Arachnodrone is an immersive multimedia installation and performance environment that presents a 3D model of a Cyrtophora citricola spider’s tropical tent-web, which serves as a modulating drone-harp with thousands of strings. The strands of the web are activated by the user’s movement through the web, and are based on proximity and principles of sympathetic resonance. The illuminated strings send data to self-adjusting oscillators, filters, and signal processors, which transform what we see into what we hear, generating melodies and chords.
Arachnodrone is a co-creation of sound artist Ian Hattwick, composer/visual artist Christine Southworth ’02, spider researcher Isabelle Su, PhD ’21, and composer and MIT CAST Faculty Director and Kenan Sahin (1963) Distinguished Professor, Music and Theater Arts Evan Ziporyn, inspired by collaborations with artist Tomás Saraceno and MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department Head and Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering Markus J. Buehler.
The Arachnodrone concert premiered in November 2018 at the invitation of Saraceno for his exhibition ON AIR at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, with the program supported by Festival d’Automne à Paris.
This project emerged from myriad interactions between different disciplines in an effort to work together—and extend the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge and practices—toward new understandings of emergent human and nonhuman entanglements. The technical development of this musical instrument was inspired and made possible by the Spider Web Scan—a novel scientific apparatus and technique for generating precise 3D scans and digital models of complex spider webs. It was first created by Saraceno in 2009–2010 in collaboration with the TU Darmstadt, and more recently refined in Saraceno’s ongoing collaboration with the MIT Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (led by Markus J. Buehler). Based closely on a tropical tent-web made by a semi-social South American Cyrtophora citricola spider, the work is not simply interdisciplinary, but quite literally an interspecies collaboration.