Sensing Transculturality in orbit
As I step onto the installation, the entire spider-web-like net covering the whole ceiling of the museum gravitates toward my feet. Looking through the exhibitions and audience from the above, my fears immediately spread like a vibration of the net at 25-meters-high. I am inside in orbit (2013), Tomás Saraceno’s installation in Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21), Düsseldorf, Germany. Imagine yourself in orbit.
Five giant spheres are floating, and only the middle sphere is covered with a mirror, while the other four are transparent. If the installation could be read as a metaphoric form of cultures ― or nations, groups of people, traditions, which all are wrapped in a foil with a label on it― the transparency would demonstrate the possibilities to be connected with other spheres of culture. The mirror would reflect other cultures or one’s self, even myself as a researcher. They also look like ‘clouds’ that accumulate information on the web to borrow the idea of ‘the Spiderʼs Web’ by Inaga Shigemi, a scholar of comparative literature and cultural exchange. Inaga, in “Huayan/Kegon 華厳 View and Contemporary East Asian Art,” theorized and connected the notion of the World Wide Web with words for “clouds(雲)” and “spiders(蜘蛛)” that are both pronounced “kumo” in Japanese. Digital cloud space in the World Wide Web and the web of “spiders”, captures researchers and is simultaneously dominated by researchers. A vertical space is created between them and the people on the ground who watch them, just as a spider would descend with a thread hanging down from its web.
Furthermore, considering the spider’s web as a metaphoric model in Transcultural Studies, Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, critically points out the missing perspective of ‘Ariadne’s thread’, a concept the late French philosopher Bruno Latour explained as “the thread of networks of practices and instruments, of documents and translations” between the global and the local as well as human and non-human. She highlights in “Can Art History Be Made Global?: Meditations from the Periphery”, “[p]roviding a two-dimensional visualization of a global spread, the nodal points and connecting lines of a network when, for example, used as a tool to study modernism, are not in a position to shed light on the third dimension that encompasses differences, unevenness and asymmetries of power, so constitutive of global modernist art movements.”
Speaking of Latour, Saraceno’s strong engagement with his theories leaves even more room for continuing the discussion. According to an interview with Saraceno after Latour’s death, the two had been in dialogue for about 15 years. Likewise, Latour was influenced by Saraceno’s work. In “Some Experiments in Art and Politics,” he reviewed Saraceno’s work as follows:
I have come to use the word “composition” to regroup in one term those many bubbles, spheres, networks, and snippets of arts and science. This concept plays the same role as Saraceno’s percept of elastic tensors. It allows us to move from spheres to networks with enough of a common vocabulary, but without a settled hierarchy.
In Transcultural Studies, just wandering around an already-established network is too risky since we have to see the process of the formations of culture, which are like the floating spheres of the installation. In order to examine the interwoven threads of the network, Saraceno's other project, “Arachnophilia” is another good example. The artist put spiders’ activities into data, and digitalized the sound produced by their vibrations of the webs, visualizing the third aspect that is not only connected with the physical web but is yet influenced by a vibration invisible to human eyes.
“Arachnophilia” derives from the story of Arachne, a female character of Greek mythology who was transformed into a spider by the goddess Athena for making her furious because Arachne’s weaving skill was superior to Athena’s. The act of weaving is connected
to anthropologist Tim Ingold’s discussion on “meshwork” instead of “network.” Saraceno’s project regards a spider’s web as “both model and metaphor for the fluid and dynamic meshwork of the ‘web of life itself.’” In addition, Inaga adds on Ingold’s theory by referring to one of the founders of Shingon Buddhism, Kûkai, and his idea on the Mandala of Both Worlds (Ryokai-mandara), arguing that in its one side, Diamond World (Kongo-kai), a number of transparent crystals steadily and subtly vibrate while in the other, Womb World, consciousness flows fluidly as what is called Arayashiki (ālaya-vijñāna in Sanskrit). The tasks now are to examine what is missing from the “web” and the elements of those threads, just like the sounds from the vibrations of spider webs.
Going back to in orbit, you feel the net shaking, but the vibrations would be the new findings that the artist or architects could never calculate, which is your task. You will intentionally or unintentionally have to keep tracing the connections; examining the texture of the threads for the next sphere to reach, even if you are scared.
Resources:
(1) Arachnophilia. (n.d.). "Arachnomythologies, or... Ways to know the Universe in a Spider/Web." https://arachnophilia.net/arachnomythologies/. Accessed on July 1st, 2023.
(2) Inaga, Shigemi. “Huayan/Kegon 華厳 View and Contemporary East Asian Art.” CrossSections 5 (March 20, 2013): 2–25.
(3) ———. “On the Validity of Spider-Web Model: Reflection on the History of Scholarship Post Face: What Is Lying beyond the Avidya of Electronic Spider’s Web".” In Avidya on the Spiderʼs Web: In Search of Psycho-Somatic Ethics in the Age of Meta- and Multi-Verse, edited by Shigemi Inaga, 299–310. Kyoto: Kachosha, 2013.
(4) Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London ; New York: Routledge, 2011.
(5) Juneja, Monica. Can Art History Be Made Global?: Meditations from the Periphery. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2023.
(6) Latour, Bruno. “Some Experiments in Art and Politics.” E-Flux Journal, no. 23 (2011): 1–7.
(7) ———. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
(8) Tomás Saraceno, "Studio Visit with Tomás Saraceno" interviewed by Berlin Art Link, 2020, YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05rgQUFPTjc&t=81s.
(9) Tominaga, Risako. “Koramu: Installation by Tomás Saraceno, in Orbit (2013) [Column: Installation by Tomás Saraceno, in Orbit (2013)].” In Avidya on the Spiderʼs Web: In Search of Psycho-Somatic Ethics in the Age of Meta- and Multi-Verse, edited by Shigemi Inaga, 196–97. Kyoto: Kachosha, 2013.