Tomas Saraceno: Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions
Visualising the sonic world of spiders.
Visualising the sonic world of spiders.
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art,
2016
Tomas Saraceno collaborates with live spider colonies, treating their intricate webs as living artworks. During his NTU CCA residency, he worked with sound artists on Arachnid Orchestra Jam Sessions, an exhibition exploring interspecies communication through spider-made sounds. Their responses were compiled into a book with an accompanying thumb drive of recordings.
We visualised the web as the book’s central motif. The cover evokes a spider’s web catching sunlight—subtle, surreal, and unexpected. Inside, a clean, quiet layout lets each artist’s ideas breathe. Modern yet gentle type choices create a sense of resonance, mirroring the delicate, sonic world of the spiders.
The structure integrates both documentation and sound: the book unfolds to reveal a thumb drive embedded in a chipboard back cover, with the extended flap doubling as the table of contents. Bound with a continuous 600gsm sheet, this inventive format won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Singapore Publisher’s Award 2018.
