MEMBRANA Vol. 3

Weaving the Future: Algorithmic translation of pictorial principles to arachnid geometry

A web platform that converts Velázquez’s Las Hilanderas into three-dimensional webs generated by algorithms inspired by the architecture of spider webs.

MEMBRANA is a cinematographic research project in three parts. The first volume is a short film nominated for the Lumen Prize. The second volume is a comic. This third volume inaugurates an exhibition installation at the Museo del Prado and is the computational laboratory where all the questions the project has accumulated since its inception converge. The axis of that convergence is a single painting: Las Hilanderas by Velázquez, a work representing women working with threads, textile machines, and a classical myth about a weaver named Arachne who challenges the gods with her art.

MEMBRANA Vol. 3 takes that image as a data source and applies a visual analysis system to generate three-dimensional geometry from its own compositional principles. A spider builds its web following patterns that respond to tension, geometry, and environment. The 17th-century textile machines appearing in Velázquez’s painting also follow repeated mechanical patterns. The algorithm generating the webs in MEMBRANA Vol. 3 operates under the same logic: it reads the light and color values of the painting and translates them into parameters of density, complexity, and spatial variation that define the structure of a synthetic spider web. What the viewer sees in the exhibition are Las Hilanderas transformed into living arachnid geometry.

The system is built on React with Three.js as the three-dimensional rendering engine. The central component initializes a 3D scene where a plane loading the painting’s image as a texture coexists with a generative spiderweb system built directly from the pixel data of that image.

It applies three successive processes: unifying duplicate vertices and normalizing the mesh to reduce polygonal complexity to allow real-time navigation; and maintaining the structural shape while removing redundant data. The result is a cloud of points and interconnected curves that preserves the topology of the painting but exists as a navigable three-dimensional object.

Las Hilanderas has been interpreted as an allegory of invisible work, collective authorship, and the tension between artisanal art and mechanized production. Arachne, the mortal weaver who in the myth competes with Athena and is transformed into a spider as punishment, embodies a question that contemporary technology constantly reformulates: who weaves, who decides the pattern, and what happens when the machine learns to spin. MEMBRANA Vol. 3 places that question at the center of its methodology. The system does not try to imitate the painting, but rather to process it as if it were a set of instructions. The colors and lights of the work become generative rules. The algorithmic spider does not reproduce what Velázquez painted; it builds from its internal data a structure that never existed on the canvas but obeys its same visual tensions. This raises an issue that the project assumes without resolving: when a computer vision system analyzes a work of art, what kind of reading does it produce, and whether that reading is interpretation, transformation, or a new form of authorship.

The platform is deployed as a web application and will be presented at the Museo del Prado as an exhibition installation. The system operates in real-time and allows visitors to manipulate web parameters from a control panel. Each variation in density or complexity produces a different geometry extracted from the same painting, making the viewer’s interaction part of the research process. The process gallery includes images and videos documenting intermediate experiments, including geometric abstractions and tests of the generative web on different fragments of the painting.

MEMBRANA Vol. 3 operates as an active research laboratory where art history, computer vision, and cinematographic narrative meet in a single technical system. The project closes the narrative arc of MEMBRANA with an open question about the nature of the weave, be it thread, light, code, or image.

Application (requires authentication):https://membranavol3-production.up.railway.app/