How to entangle the universe in a spider web? (Gravitational semi-social semi-social solitary Choreography ζ Cet built by: an ensemble of Cyrtophora citricola - four weeks, a duet of Cyrtophora citricola juvenile - one week and a solo Nephila edulis - one week)

Bruno Latour views Saraceno’s work as “a model for social theory.” He says the artist’s practice “gives a sense of order, legibility, precision and elegant engineering, and yet has no hierarchical structure. It is as if there were a vague possibility of retaining modernism’s feeling of clarity and order, but freed from its ancient connection with hierarchy and verticality.” The privileging in Saraceno’s practice of natural forms, including the spider webs which are the subject of this work, certainly determines a preference for forms of interconnectivity, reciprocity, galactic relations, and social bonds which resist hierarchy. For Saraceno, spiders’ webs in particular provide a wealth of data around forms of sociality, construction, and communication that could prove essential for imagining new ways for humans to inhabit the world. He has worked with researchers at MIT to develop a scanning technology which uses tomographic methods to create detailed, three-dimensional scans of the webs produced by spiders at his studio. The scans enable new analyses to be undertaken which reveal how various strands of spider silk physically interact and attach themselves to one another. How to entangle the universe in a spider web depicts elements of this scanning technology through the operative work of a red laser which unveils the intricacies of the web completed by the spiders of varying species and social natures referred to in the title.

Saraceno’s interest in this technology lies in its suggestion of other hidden layers of connectivity in the universe, asks he asks: “how many webs, cosmic, ecological, social, are we still not capable of seeing?”

— Elsa Gray