A couple of weeks ago, I went to the “Spiders of Paradise” exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. This is a small collection of photographs and video by the artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso.
The exhibition is about the Maratus (Wikipedia link) genus of spiders. They are commonly known as “peacock spiders”, because the males are brightly coloured and dance to attract the females (who are brown).
These spiders are very small: typically about 3 – 4 millimetres. But the artist has taken very zoomed-in photographs and printed them on a large scale, so that the spiders appear to be over a metre tall and looking directly at the viewer, often with two visible pairs of intensely green or purple eyes. When I stepped into one of the exhibition rooms, I had an impression of what it could be like to be surrounded by a group of curious but hard-to-read aliens. In an interview, the artist talked about her goal of bringing tiny and hard-to-notice creatures into a scale that humans can relate to.
There were two videos showing a male spider dancing for a female. Again, these were very zoomed-in. Although I knew that these spiders were very small, I lost track of just how small until an enormous human fingertip gently entered the frame. This reminded me of walking along the Melbourne Solar System trail, a 1 to 1 billion scale model of our solar system. I’ve seen lots of illustrations of the solar system labelled “not to scale”, and although I try scale up the pictures in my mind, it seems hard to scale up far enough. Walking from a 1.4 metre-tall statue of the sun to models of the other planets gave a much more vivid impression of distance and emptiness. And the distance from the sun statue to the nearby statue of Proxima Centauri is also to scale… but only if you travel around the world from Melbourne to Melbourne via both the South and North poles first.
Zooming in/zooming out is one of the approaches suggested in Navigating Ambiguity for gaining different perspectives on a problem or creative project. The Spiders of Paradise exhibition and the Solar System trail suggest to me that if we think we’ve zoomed in or zoomed out far enough, there may be benefits if we try to zoom in or zoom out further… and further and further.
Related links:
For more information about peacock spiders, see the website maintained by Jurgen Otto, a researcher who specialises in studying them: www.peacockspider.org. Note that this site has lots of images of spiders. However, Jurgen Otto has claimed that even “arachnophobes love these spiders”: Sydney scientist’s ‘adorable’ spider discovery (link to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s news website).
Other places in the world have solar system models. See Solar System Models (Wikipedia link) for a list.