Hybrid Encounters: Speaker Introduction - Tomás Saraceno

Tomás Saraceno has invited guests "Hybrid Encounters - Art Meets Science" second round on May 25, at 7 pm. It will be an evening under the triad of "Art, Biology and Algorithms". The artist and his guests: Tim Landgraf, Alex Jordan and Ingo Rechenberg will talk about what we can learn by analizing spider colonies from differnt disciplines. The discussion is supplemented by the "Arachnid Jam Session", a performance by the musician David Rothenberg with a spider.

Tomás Saraceno is an argentine performance and installation artist. In his artworks he deploys insights from engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, aeronautics and materials science. He creates inflatable and airborne biospheres with the morphology of soap bubbles, spider webs, neural networks or cloud formations, which are speculative models for alternate ways of living for a sustainable future.

In 2015, Saraceno achieved the world record for the first and longest certified fully-solar manned flight. During the past decade, he has initiated collaborations with renowned scientific institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Max Planck Institute, the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and the Natural History Museum London.

Spiders spin tiny Universes.

A major theme in Saracenos works is the study of spider webs. The fabrics sometimes look like hypermodern cityscapes. He was the first person to scan, reconstruct and reimagine spiders’ weaved spatial habitats, and possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection to existence. The Hybird Web sculptures are built by different spiders in terrariums in succession, one type after the other. Each different kind of spider spun a new web, integrating its predecessors’ webs and creating hybrid web structures. During the building period each cube was turned its various sides, dislodging gravity and interweaving silvery spider silk from different arachnid species. To Saraceno spider webs are not only fascinating for their material properties (in relation to weight, spider silk is four times stronger than steel, and spider silk threads can be stretched many times their length), they are also a symbol of human social behavior and connectivity within society.

Arachnid Jam Sessions

Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions is an interspecies encounter between arachnids and anthropos mediated by sound. Exploring the arachnids’s sophisticated mode of communication through vibrations, Saraceno developed several instruments that are able to amplify the vibrations of spiders, rendering them audible to other species. Sculptural presences in the exhibition, the various instruments ranging from strings, to percussion and aeolic, were also incorporated by musicians into their live performances.

We are curious about friday evenings sequence with Tomás Saraceno and his guests live on the stage at the concert hall of the University of Arts.  

-Rosa