This project begins with the full genome of a house spider—millions of nucleotide bases stored as a .txt file. In this abstraction, the body is gone. The digital genome is stripped of context, flattened into a string of A, T, C, and G, ready to be analyzed, copied, or monetized. As N. Katherine Hayles writes, “information and materiality are distinct entities,” and this separation installs a hierarchy: information dominates, material presence fades (1999, p. 12).

I chose to translate this DNA into crochet, base by base, stitch by stitch. Not to reverse abstraction, but to ask what happens when code is handled with care. Each gesture marked time, friction, slowness, what Hayles might call a resistance to the cybernetic fantasy of disembodiment. This is cybernetic eroticism: a fantasy of pure, frictionless information that both erases and depends on the body. As she notes, the posthuman subject is “a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (1999, p. 3). The digital genome performs a rupture, but also creates a strange intimacy. La petite mort, as Hayles suggests, becomes distributed across a network of stitches, screens, and sensations.

This act of re-embodiment does not recover the spider, but repositions the translator. The resulting crochet piece is no longer about the organism, it becomes about labor, duration, and the experience of translating something too large to hold. Like Ryoji Ikeda’s data performances, it overwhelms through repetition, scale, and loss.

Eventually, the strand began to resemble a scarf. I joked about selling it: “your favorite animal’s genome as wearable code.” The absurdity revealed something: once digitized, the spider’s genome felt ownable. Luciana Parisi describes this as the capitalization of recombinant information, where biological code becomes surplus value, “ready to be packaged, predicted, and sold” (2004, p. 152). Code, in this system, becomes aesthetic, extractable, and exchangeable.

What began as an act of care became a reflection on control. Not just what is lost in translation, but what is made desirable. The spider disappears, but the logic remains. And perhaps that is the most intimate part of cybernetic eroticism: not dismemberment, but the quiet pleasure of reattachment under new terms.