When Spiders Spin Dusk—Spiralling Outwards
Below is the collaborator’s statement regarding the exhibition When Spiders Spin Dusk (curated by Junghyun Kim), Seoul, South Korea, January 2025. This project emerged from Intelligent Terrain, a speculative ecologies program centring on AI’s entanglement with the landscape, which I led and developed the curriculum for since 2021 as UKAI Projects’ Studio Director.
For project documentation: https://whenspidersspindusk.com/
I began writing this article thinking it would be like a letter—pensive, slow, and meandering, much like the process of bringing an idea to fruition. Letters present a stark contrast to email. With letters, I hesitate over every opening. With emails, I routinely begin without much thought:
“I hope this email finds you well.”
This opening line has become a formality—a habit, a muscle memory, detached from its original intent. I hope this email doesn’t find me. As a matter of fact, I hope this email doesn’t find you either. Who started writing this phrase, and why? Much like our communications, the phrase has become transactional, reshaped by the efficiency-driven constraints of digital mediums. Today, we live among large language models that automate words, smoothing transitions and filling gaps. Words, once crafted carefully, have become tools of convenience. This abstraction shapes not only how we communicate but how we create.
Social media platforms serve as a Procrustean bed, forcing people to chop and mould would-be stories into forms that appease the algorithms. Short-form reels distill pop songs into 30-second highlights with neither beginnings nor ends. Explainer videos strip novels, movies, and many other forms of storytelling of their narrative richness, while the relentless pressure to optimize for engagement flattens ideas into digestible fragments. As I critique this arbitrarily enforced uniformity, I’m reminded that the bread I bake conforms to the shape of its pan and that fermenting vegetables on my kitchen counter are held in a jar. Yet, there’s a profound difference between being held gently by a form and being forced into a rigid shape.
Ursula K. LeGuin, in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, referred to early technologies as vessels rather than weapons—tools for carrying and holding that emerged out of care. This reframing of technology provides a lens through which to view the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek analog computer recovered from a shipwreck. Built to model the geocentric universe, it was once a vessel holding precise mathematical abstractions to predict celestial movements. Yet, it now stands as both a marvel of its time and a relic of a worldview we no longer believe true. Similarly, the iconic Earthrise photograph captured by Apollo 8’s William Anders offered a new vessel of perception, presenting Earth not as the center of the cosmos but as one fragile body among many. When the dominant narrative about intelligence focuses disproportionately on a narrow subset of human traits, exemplified by the ability to learn, extrapolate patterns, and communicate through language, we must ask ourselves, what do we believe about the uniqueness of human intelligence that is no longer true? Machine intelligence and cognitive technologies now possess a much greater capacity to store, analyze, sort, and communicate information than we do, thanks to advancements in computing. When we reflect on our digital lives alongside artificial agents, what do we see in the void staring back? What shifts when we consider human intelligence as just one among many ways of perceiving, remembering, and knowing?
These shifts in perspective mirror the questions posed by When Spiders Spin Dusk, co-produced by Junghyun Kim and UKAI Projects. Featuring Canadian artists Erika-Jean Lincoln, François Quévillon, and Maurice Jones, alongside Korean artists Unmake Lab, Sunjoo Lee, and Sunjeong Hwang, the project explores entangled ecosystems of organic and machine intelligences.
The artistic methods of inquiry probe the shifting contours of a world shaped by climate change, increased automation, and hidden authoritarian forces, inviting us to reconsider our place within a web of tangled systems. This notion of entanglement—of relationships we neither choose nor fully control—resonates deeply with the words of Chippewa legal scholar John Borrows in his foreword to Entangled Territorialities:
To be alive is to be entangled in relationships not entirely of our own making. We are born to parents whom we did not choose. Our families pre-existed our arrival. We perceive languages, cultures, and world views before getting much choice in the matter. Our formative years are threaded with social, emotional, and economic relationships that we did not conceive. They are woven into our very being, largely without our permission.
…
We cannot fully step outside of our past conditioning or present circumstances and totally recreate ourselves in the process. We do not make anything whole out of entirely new cloth. We must use the materials at hand in fashioning our alternatives.
Borrows’ reflection highlights the profound interconnectedness of existence—a tapestry woven from inherited threads of language, culture, and circumstance. This recognition of entanglement underpins the works of When Spiders Spin Dusk. The participating artists draw from the materials at hand—ecological metaphors, algorithmic systems, and cultural mythologies—to reimagine our relationships within a world of interdependent beings.
The project’s collaborative process materialized at Ferme Lanthorn, a regenerative willow farm near Wakefield, Quebec, where structured exchanges, workshops, and field studies fostered deep connections. At Ferme Lanthorn, the rhythms of cultivation and renewal became both a setting and a metaphor. The artists engaged deeply with the cycles of the land, the non-human inhabitants, and one another, allowing these tangled systems to inform and shape their practices. The Anishinaabe, original inhabitants of the terrain where Ferme Lanthorn is situated, tell the story of the Spider Woman as a protector, weaving webs to watch over children in their dreams as their individual lives unfold. In Egyptian lore, Neith and the spider she created spin the world into being at dawn and unravel at dusk. Myths anchor us through telling and re-telling stories in new contexts, like continuous threads spiralling outwards., intersecting new events and happenings. In an attempt to witness bringing a vessel into being, we worked with Lanthorn’s Mary Ellis to learn the fundamentals of willow basketry. Our hands gently held whips of willow, harvested from the farm at dawn and soaked in a running creek, and gave them form following a series of instructions. Though the act of following a series of instructions can easily be dismissed as mechanical, the press of the fingers at the right moment with the proper force presents itself as an intimate and direct encounter with the aliveness of the material—an aliveness that we tend to forget about the physical infrastructure underpinning our digital lives. From the rare earth minerals extracted forcefully from the ground to the satellites ripping their paths across the night sky, they were once cradled by the same landscapes that raised all beings bearing different forms of intelligence—some of which we have yet to acknowledge. Modern technologies do not exist independently of ecological systems nor outside worldviews from which cultures take root. Let’s pull our focus back to the willow, once branches on a tree held gently by the landscape surrounding and fed by the bodies of water that perhaps flowed through our human bodies at one point. As the webs of stories about spiders reference, the branches of willow spiralling from center to peripheral, composing a round basket, represent ways of seeing the world not as discrete parts but as a continuous whole. This resonates with the works from When Spiders Spin Dusk, where artists explore the interconnected threads that bind the algorithmic and ecological systems. They remind us that cyclical returns, though no longer the primary rhythm of modern life, persist beneath the abstract notions of progress and linear logic on which we have become reliant.
Even as modernity abstracts our realities into models and algorithms, our technologies remain entangled with the physical world: the flicker of a light during a coronal mass ejection of the sun, the silence of a power outage caused by an electrocuted raccoon in downtown Toronto, the corrosion of electronic devices in the relentless humidity that came with a heavy flood. These moments collapse the boundaries between modern infrastructure and the natural world, grounding us in the inescapable interdependence of all things.
When Spiders Spin Dusk does not offer simple answers. Instead, it weaves a network of perspectives, inviting us to reflect on the relationships—between humans, technologies, and ecologies—that constantly overwrite our understanding of our humanness and what it means to live among beings that inhabit the world differently. We are participants in the unfolding of narratives we do not always control.
Perhaps this is a letter of invitation—an appeal to linger in the discomfort of uncertainty and imagine new vessels for carrying the world forward. After all, a letter asks for a response.
