Ariadne’s Futures (invited contribution to a ‘cosmic jam session’ for the opening of Tomás Saraceno’s exhibit at the Palais de Tokyo, 2018)
The real story of Ariadne’s thread is one of imagining possible futures. Escape from frame, on the thread of a tune, collaborating with environmental forces, grafting a breakaway, becoming-spider. “Spiders spin tiny universes.” “To improvise is to join with a world.” Dionysus saw in Ariadne a new world: “I am your labyrinth” (and elsewhere its inversion: “Ariadne, you are a labyrinth: Theseus has lost his way in it, he has no more direction....”). A spider’s web is a little aerocene, buoyantly transcending space-time, “inflated by air, lifted only by the sun, carried only by the wind, towards a sustainable future.” The web itself is merely a tool, the act of spinning a creative practice: an ecology of practices, of enacting new connections and new dimensional possibilities, always shifting, always in motion. Ariadne knew this, she gave Theseus the means, but her goal was transcendence—beyond good and evil, beyond reproductions of old regimes of thought and power where Minotaurs devour virgins and gods (and kings) rain petty wrath on their subjects.
A web is a tool to engender new connections, new lines of escape, “a network of interconnections in which each element expands and transforms the others, reconfiguring their material and social boundaries.” For Tomás Saraceno, the model is Parawixia bistriata——social, communal, orb-weaving spiders—transforming directional lines (“you have no more direction”) into pluradimensional languages, transforming flat planes into n-dimensional cloud cities. “Floating galaxies...challenging gravity and fostering the emergence of new kinds of vibrational environments.” Everything is at stake in Saraceno’s work: imagining a post-anthropocene, intra-species and environmental collaborations, beyond borders, “attuning to others’ Umwelten, towards novel ways of living together.” But “the spirit who bears the heaviest fate...can nevertheless be the lightest and most transcendent.” Sound. Air. Vibration. Connection. Transformation. A new cosmopolitics.
“There is always sonority in Ariadne’s thread.”
Sources
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Nadia Drake, “Why Thousands of Spiders are Crawling in the Skies Over Brazil,” Wired, 11 February, 2013.
Luce Irigaray, “Veiled Lips,” translated by Sara Speidel, in Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1967).
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann (Penguin, 1977).
Tomás Saraceno, “How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web,” “Hybrid Webs,” “In Orbit,” “Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities” (tomassaraceno.com).
Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, translated by Robert Bononno (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).