*Please note that some seating for Spider's Canvas / Arachnodrone is on floor mats.

**Since we are sold out for some performances, we encourage guests to arrive on time or early. We will be creating a waitlist and we will release all unclaimed tickets to those on the waitlist at the stated performance start time. This waitlist will be a physical waitlist at the venue, not on Eventbrite.

MIT SOUNDING PRESENTS

The live concert of Spider’s Canvas / Arachnodrone is a co-creation of composer and MIT CAST Faculty Director Evan Ziporyn, composer/visual artist Christine Southworth ’02, sound artist Ian Hattwick, spider researcher Isabelle Su, in collaboration with artist Tomás Saraceno, whose originating idea provides the basis of the concert, and MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) department head and McAfee Professor Markus Buehler.

The concert premiered in November 2018 as part of Saraceno’s acclaimed carte blanche exhibition ON AIR at Palais de Tokyo in Paris curated by Rebecca Lamarche Vadel, with the programme supported by Festival d’Automne, Paris.

This concert 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 non-human 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 – 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 Buehler). Based closely on a tent-web made by a semi-social South American Cyrtophora citricola spider, the work is not simply interdisciplinary, but quite literally an interspecies collaboration.

Spider’s Canvas is a co-production of MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology, MIT Music & Theater Arts, MIT Civil & Environmental Engineering.

To see excerpts of the Paris performances, please visit arachnodrone.com.

MIT News:
Spider web music: An inspiring harmony of art and science

The Washington Post:
‘Spider’s Canvas/Arachnodrone’: A web of otherworldly music

CAST Blog:
A Three-Dimensional Spider Web Soundscape Comes to Life

Image: Spider’s Canvas performance during Tomas Saraceno’s exhibition ON AIR at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France on November 23, 2018. Photo courtesy of Aurelie Cenno/Palais de Tokyo.