If AI Were Cephalopod

0rphan Drift
(Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts)

May 4t​h ​– June 15th​, 2019

Opening Reception:  Saturday, May 4t​h​, 6 – 9pm
Closing Reception:  Saturday, June 8t​h​, 2 – 4pm

Watch the Video Documentation of the Exhibition: HERE!

If AI were cephalopod it would have three hearts and see with its skin.

Telematic Media Arts is pleased to present If AI were Cephalopod, a new multi-channel video installation by collaborative artist 0rphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts), which - as a form of speculative fiction - imaginatively constructs an AI consciousness coded with the somatic tendencies of the octopus. The piece complicates the boundaries between humans, animals, and synthetic beings in order to imagine possible future embodiments and forms of consciousness. Drawing upon Embodied Cognitive Science and Radical Anthropology, the artist asks, what paradigm of “intelligence” are we presupposing in the development of Artificial Intelligence? Is it not perhaps better to imagine the intelligence of machines in light of, what we now recognize as, the remarkably sophisticated cognition of other creatures? What alternative forms of experience and perception are revealed in so doing? And if intelligence is so conceived, is human cognition not perhaps already more of a distributed consciousness than commonly understood?

About the Artist

0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision, since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time.

Their contemporary work manifests as video projections, installations, texts and site specific projects. Carrying the signal into a moment organized much more thoroughly by time travel. Considering current narratives around climate change, bio- capital and related migratory patterns we re-imagine the urban as porous, interspecies and terraformed. We are researching the sentience and sensory intelligence of the octopus in an attempt to imagine the alien distributed consciousness of algorithm systems, and continue to work with moving images and ancient predictive technologies such as I-Ching and the shamanic technique of Interspecies Communication to create non-linear narratives and installations.

Recently their work has been included in the exhibitions Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms, Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary and De La Warr Pavilion UK, Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon, Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or, Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen Germany and Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY and in the book Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

Image: 0rphan Drift, “If AI were Cephalopod,” 2019, video still