This project is an attempt to reconstruct the spider. Positioning the drone as a new fabrication tool, I designed a process for weaving structures of thread in mid-air. A spider reads the environment it is given and weaves its web according to the arrangement of trees and branches at hand. Working without a fixed drawing, building structure out of the shape of the site itself, this practice was reconstructed as a system. First, aerial photography and 3D scanning by drone capture the surrounding terrain and the placement of the trees as three-dimensional data. From this environmental data, the overall form of the structure and a flight path that avoids the trees and existing ropes are generated automatically in CAD. Then a drone flying autonomously through a technique called SLAM, together with a custom-built electric reel, pays out rope at a constant tension and weaves it into the air one line at a time. The material is a 2 mm polyethylene rope with a load capacity of 150 kilograms per line and high weather resistance, strong enough for a person to climb and entrust their weight to. The structure is redundant, distributing the load across many lines, so that even if a single line breaks, the whole does not collapse. In this way, a structure both delicate and large in scale rises in places the human hand could not easily reach, high above the ground or across a valley. At its center, a mesh is woven where a person can rest as if in a hammock, and a place suspended among the trees comes into being. Here the drone becomes more than a device for filming; it turns into an instrument that reads the environment, responds to it, and weaves thread into space. The trees, too, are not a predetermined foundation for the structure, but their very arrangement becomes the starting point of the design. The finished structure is a place where a person can climb, lie down, and look up at the sky, yet once dismantled it leaves nothing behind in the forest. This work is a system for weaving structures in the unexplored space of the air, built and then returned.

In a corner of a valley on the Izu Peninsula in Japan, where the mountains come right down to the sea, I stretched a radiating net spanning some fifty meters and let a cocoon float at its center. The threads reach toward the trees and the slopes of the valley, and their form is entrusted to the nature of this place. Resonating with wind, light, and gravity, the countless threads weave relations between things and invisible forces, making manifest the undulations of a valley that had seemed empty, and the life latent within it. The egg-bearing cocoon at the center is an archetype that evokes the origin of life, while the whole, its threads radiating outward, calls a spider's web to mind. Upon the web, death nourishes life, and at times the parent spider becomes nourishment for new life. It is a microcosm of the cycle of life, a place where self and other dissolve into one another through love. Shifting their vantage, gazing from the roadside or passing beneath the net, viewers come upon the living relations the threads bind together. To make the work, I used a drone as a device for spinning thread, weaving the lines into the air one by one. Bringing nature and technology into harmony, the work quietly intimates that life is something held within an immense web of relations.

Across a valley in the mountains that rise from the sea on the Izu Peninsula in Japan, I stretched a white membrane scalloped into waves. The translucent membrane transforms its shape in response to the wind that sweeps through the valley. In the daylight hours it sways as it catches the light, and at night it kindles a living glow, like a creature swimming serenely through the air. The valley spreads one hundred and twenty meters wide and falls more than fifty meters deep. To install it, I entrusted one end of a wire to a drone and let it fly to the far slope, suspending the work across the valley. Within the responses of material, technology, terrain, and weather, the membrane breathes in this place. The work is a faint medium that reflects the moods this land holds, its mountains and sea, its wind and light, its shifting colors and quiet presences.

Across the hollow of a symbolic spiral staircase that links the circulation of city and park, of ground and underground, I stretched countless threads and let cocoons drift, scattered, within the net. The threads are drawn as if sewing along the spiral's curve and its columns, and resonating with shifts in the air, with light, with gravity, and with the people passing through, they hold a tension and a balance with this beautiful structure. The scattered cocoons hold a soft light, evoking the beginning of life. Amid an organic spiral that calls DNA to mind, the countless threads bind cocoon to cocoon, weaving them into a single network. Shifting their vantage, following the spiral or passing beneath the net, viewers come upon these networks of life. What the work intimates is the balance of life, held within an unceasing trembling.

In a green plaza opened in the heart of the city, I created an installation that takes the Milky Way as its subject. Borrowing a gesture from Tanabata, the Japanese star festival in which people write their wishes on narrow strips of paper called tanzaku and hang them out beneath the summer Milky Way, I loosely linked together ribbon-like strips of mesh, each differing in color and length, and gave spatial form to countless wishes turned toward the future. By controlling, in three dimensions, the curve of each single strand and the gradation of color across the whole, I sought an appearance that shifts moment by moment as it catches the light and the wind, holding within it the complexity and beauty of a starry sky. Over the course of the exhibition, cards written by the hands of visitors were tied on one by one, and the work grew denser day by day. Each wish set down came to lie beside the wishes of others, and within a run of only three days, as many as 1,800 wishes gathered together to raise up a single Milky Way.