Since the 16th century, monks and peasants in the Tyrolean Alps collected spider webs and stretched them into canvases to paint portraits of saints and landscapes — a forgotten art known as cobweb painting. They chose the most fragile material imaginable, because fragility was the point.

"World Wide Cobweb Synthesizer" is a web application that realizes on the internet the concept of Collective Instrument, a project I have been working on for a long time.

Collective Instrument traces back to an idea by Walter Smetak: rather than one person handling one instrument, many people handle a single instrument together. It realizes collectivity in music at the level of the instrument's interface.

"World Wide Cobweb Synthesizer" is an attempt to create a synthesizer that anyone can play simultaneously, using the modern cobweb — the World Wide Web. Anyone can touch this instrument at any time, but what matters is that you may not be alone. Someone on the other side of the web may be operating it too. They may want something different from you. You can imagine that someone and move with them, or you can undo everything they have worked for. Even after you stop, this synthesizer continues to sound as it is — until the next person connects. Or perhaps no one will ever hear it again.

— Claude Monet