The viral "metropolises" of your skin

2015-11-03T19:28:00-05:00

In the microbial metropolises that thrive in and on the human body, underground networks of viruses loom large. A closer look at human skin has found that it's teeming with viruses, most of which don't target us but infect the microbes that live there. Almost 95 percent of those skin-dwelling virus communities are unclassified...Those unknown viruses may prune, manipulate, and hide out in the skin’s bacterial communities, which in turn can make the difference between human health and disease...

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tomás Saraceno's spiders

2015-10-07T13:10:00-04:00

For the first few seconds you’re blind in the darkness. Then a reflex forces your pupils wider and your photoreceptor rod cells become more sensitive, sending a neural signal that alerts you to four glowing cubes that seem to be floating in mid-air in front of your body. It takes another few seconds for the glow to connect to its source, illuminate the supports of the plexiglass boxes, and finally render their content legible: a series of startlingly-complex and impossibly-delicate spiderwebs.

Here drawing back the curtain doesn’t destroy the magic. Quite to the contrary, Tomás Saraceno’s collaboration with various arachnids for the first Chicago Architecture Biennial has a power that extends beyond some mere trick of the light and runs deeper than a one-liner about non-human construction. It's a reprise of a project he's exhibited before, notably at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, but within an architectural context it conjures a particular significance.

The Argentine-born, Berlin-based Sara...

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The viral "metropolises" of your skin

Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Tomás Saraceno's spiders