Featured Project: Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web
Tomás Saraceno
Tomás Saraceno, Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, 2022. Custom steel, wire net, wood, light, LFE, shakers, fog. Diameter: 95 feet. Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Commissioned by The Shed. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy The Shed.
As part of an expansive exhibition of his work, titled Particular Matter(s), The Shed commissioned Tomás Saraceno to construct a new artwork, which would take full advantage of their soaring multipurpose space, The McCourt. Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, was a 95-foot pressurized sphere, inside which visitors lay on a taught web-like net floating 40-feet above the ground, in order to experience vibrations derived from the movement of particles in the air, similar to the way spiders relay information through vibratory mechanisms.
The Powerhouse Public Art team was hired to assemble and install a technically complex and uniquely designed lighting sculpture, itself encased in a 17-foot pressurized orb, and hung high inside the immersive expanse, like a ghostly sun.
Tomás Saraceno, Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, 2022. Custom steel, wire net, wood, light, LFE, shakers, fog. Diameter: 95 feet. Artwork © Studio Tomás Saraceno. Commissioned by The Shed. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy The Shed.
Project Duration
November 2021 – April 2022
Project Team
Zeelie Brown, Art Domantay, Vaneik Echeverria, Jeremy Gender, Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, Jacon Olmedo, Daniel Quinn, Dan Vissac