A Recursive Web of Models: Studio Tomás Saraceno's Working Objects

Abstract

This article addresses contemporary artist-architect Tomás Saraceno and his studio team's work in the context of art and science collaborations. The text pays special attention to how their artistic practice deals with questions of environmental formations and agency. Besides a context in speculative architecture, this article approaches Saraceno's material engagement as working objects, borrowing the term from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's work. The studio's engagement with images, sculptures, and other material objects is relevant to a broader set of discussions about materiality and the modelization of and through living beings. The article argues how spatial (spider) web constructions and sculptures work as diffractive yet productive models, concluding with how these models engage with larger questions of environmental humanities and practice-based art methods.