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 is pleased to present If AI were Cephalopod, a new multi-channel video installation by the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts), which explores fictional relationships between human, animals and synthetic entities, in order to imagine possible future embodiments and forms of consciousness. Drawing upon Embodied Cognitive Science and Radical Anthropology, the artists ask what paradigm of “intelligence” we presuppose in the development of Artificial Intelligence, implicitly challenging commonplace assumptions about what it means to be human as distinct from other forms of life. 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 doing so? And if intelligence is so understood, is human cognition not perhaps already more of a distributed consciousness? In this work, 0rphan drift poses an AI imagination coded by the somatic tendencies of the octopus.

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.

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