Fear, Roombas, and The Motions of Aerial Spiders
This project is bit personal, a bit obsessive, a bit strange and more than a bit creepy crawly. It’s about spiders, my fear of them, and the peculiar motions they can make when weaving a web. In particular, it’s about this spotted orbweaver, which set up outside my home in the fall of 2022, just as I was beginning graduate school. It’s roughly the size of $1 coin, and it’s web it’s 1.5 to two feet in diameter.
Spotted orbweaver in the evening, perched at center of web, waiting without moving
Spotted orbweaver in the evening, perched at center of web, waiting without moving
The spider lays out a radial structure first, then spirals inwards, repeatedly drawing silk and tethering connections
For context, I have feared spiders since I was young. You can see in this slide that my fear is / was a bit mis-calibrated: scorpions, snakes, and diving, are all much more hazardous, but comparably comfortable.
Graph of my fear level and actual danger level (approximate) for different organisms and activities, including house centipeds (and variations thereof), public speaking, skydiving, scorpions, snakes, and free diving. Icons via the nounproject.
I began this work with the hope that I could use creative work as a self directed exposure therapy process to move past that fear. Of course, the goal was also about picking opportunities to practice courage or ‘stretch my comfort zone’ as the saying goes. Albert Bandura wrote about this phenomenon in association with his snake phobia research: positive patient outcomes around one phobia were accompanied by positive outcomes elsewhere in life. In my own life, I maintain a ‘scary things list’ and generally find engaging with fear in one area of life develops helps to a ‘muscle’ with broader applications. With this knowledge and intention, the spider’s presence in my walkway was helpfully reframed as a developmental opportunity.
Entrance to the covered hallway between my apartment complex and parking - the spider is (barely) visible in the top left corner of the frame, perhced at the center of it’s web (against the green backdrop of a wood panel in the background). On the other side of the left wall (not visible) sits a lantern that attracts insects.
Closer up - light from the lantern (and my camera flash) illuminates the web
That fall I enrolled in the course Ecocentric Design at UT Austin, which was taught by Jiabao Li, and used the structure and methods of that course to investigate the spider. Given my personal/developmental interest in the work, the project grew beyond the course in volume of time and duration and I interpreted the (already flexible) assignments to suit my objective.
Concretely, this consisted of months of daily observation through the fall. It’s a nocturnal creature (it constructed its web in the evening on a nearly daily basis), so I would take notes and photographs in the morning and late at night on either end of my commute. I followed that period of observation with a flurry of creative activity.