Paper short abstract:

Without overstressing the spider/web symbolism, we will present our multimodal website and highlight (or “trouble”) various processes of decision-making involved that range from structuring, curating, editing, and layering data to graphic design choices.

Paper long abstract:

Are spiders good to think with?

At the latest since the dissemination of Donna Haraway’s concept of “tentacular thinking” (Haraway 2016) and the publication of Feral Atlas (Tsing et. al. 2020) it has become apparent that human exceptionalism and the mono-perspectivism that often accompanies it, have become inadequate knowledge practices. The tentacular are nets and networks and tentacularity is about entanglements and layerings - we therefore argue that spiders ARE good to think with.

Our presentation is based on many years of audio-visual research on the Southern Italian spider possession cult “tarantism.” In addition to leveraging the (multimodal) archive, writing about the phenomenon and producing an essayistic documentary film, we have also created a website that we are continuously extending. To create an intermedia perspective we combine texts, sounds, still and moving images in formats such as ›scollytelling‹, soundscapes or an extensive timeline that reconstructs the history of medialization of the phenomenon in the second half of the 20th century.

Without overstressing the spider/web symbolism, in our presentation we will present the multimodal website and guide an interested audience through its features. In doing so, we will highlight (or “trouble”) various processes of decision-making involved that range from structuring, curating, editing, and layering data to graphic design choices.