Live on the Towers!

This week it is, once again, something on tower n.4 that has caught our eye. 

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We were already aware that spiders inhabit the towers, it is hard in fact to find any space in Mediamatic that a spider has not made a home out of. However, this time the spider webs have an unusual feature: thick shimmering lines traced across them.

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To the naked eye these strokes look uniform and white or semi-translucent, sparkling when they catch the light. But with the aid of the macro-lens camera, we are able to see they are actually a complex mirror-like net of shapes that refracts light, splitting its rays and creating the colours of the rainbow.

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We have not been able to observe this firsthand, but the most plausible conclusion we have arrived at is that these strokes were created by snails crossing over the spiderwebs as if they are bridges. Journeying from one peak to the next along the landscape of the tower.

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It is proving hard to find any literature about this specific phenomenon, but it is likely that thanks to the sliminess they produce from their glands, the slugs and snails become immune to the stickiness of the spider web, and easily glide over them, escaping from the clutches of the spiders.

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The closeup images somehow remind me of the milky way. The context of the image is lost when looking from this close, allowing any reference of scale to dissolve in our minds. The patterns that the combination of the snails' slime and the spiders' silk create look like fractals, that could be as infinitely big as galaxies or as small as cells.

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