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, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time.
In its latest manifestation, 0rphan Drift considers Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. Inspired by embodied cognitive science and radical anthropology, their multiple channel installations suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools they are exploring such as LIDAR, Blender, Touch Designer and photogrammetry to suggest new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kind of bodies might be possible with these new coordinates. Currently they are working toward deepening their engagement into the field, involving direct encounters with cephalopods and collaborative explorations with Machine Learning engineers, marine world film makers, VR designers, dancers, sound artists and teuthologists.
PROJECT IN DEVELOPMENT
‘Nine Brains’, a speculative fiction project that assumes an octopoid world view as a means of playing with and questioning the presence of artificial intelligence in current narratives of futurity. The project includes fiction writing, research, performance scores, dance, digital animation and watercolours. These elements are building towards our first XR work, which will physically engage participant audiences in a story about an AI learning from the cognitive and behavioural tendencies of an octopus. The project casts the viewer in multiple bodies at once, as human, octopus and AI, opening up pathways of embodiment and sensuality and engendering an encounter with the unknown. Nonhuman elements of the environment, a kelp forest and a ventscape, are as much characters as are octopus or a human diver and dancers.
RECENT SHOWS, PERFORMANCES AND PUBLICATIONS
Launch of the ISCRI website, https://iscri.ai/
Partnered and hosted by the Serpentine Gallery’s Creative AI Lab. Featured in their Arts Technology publication Future Art Ecosystems 4 (2024).
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/about/press/future-art-ecosystems-creative-ai-lab/
Serpentine Twitch TV event ‘A Cephalopod <-> Machine Encounter’, Maggie Roberts of 0rphan Drift & Serpentine Arts Technologies in conversation
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1180305964?lang=it
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/a-cephalopod-%e2%86%94-machine-encounter/ and essay on the project by Alasdair Milne of the Creative AI Lab https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/interspecies-communication-research-initiative-iscri-a-cephalopod-%e2%86%94-machine-encounter/
Fluid Ground residency, artwork commission and publication, ACE and Goldsmiths University Research funded. Commissioned by Dr Kirsten Cooke and artist Melanie Jackson.
Elia Vargas Plasma Series performance of the ‘Nine Brains’ fiction, UBC Canada.
‘Nine Brains’ fiction performance at Gray Area Festival 10, San Francisco.
Performance talk and interview with Ido Radon for C0da exhibition at Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany. Online interview on the C0da archive site.
‘Octopoid Aesthetics’ chapter with Delphi Carstens for ‘Hydrofeminist Thinking with Oceans’, Astrid Neimanis, ed.Tamara Shefer, pub. Sternberg Press.
0rphan Drift in Jake Chapman’s film ‘Accelerationism’, launched at the Barbican Cinema, London and on Sky Arts.
0rphan Drift works have been included recently in the exhibitions
May the Other Live in Me, Laboratoria Art Science, Moscow;
Monitor: Surveillance, Data and the New Panoptic, ICA MECA, Maine;
Metabolic Market at Giant, Bournemouth;
The Archive To Come at Telematic Gallery San Francisco;
This Is A Not-Me at iMT Gallery London;
0rphan Drift and Friends, Public Records TV NYC;
Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK;
Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon;
Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or;
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.
Solo exhibitions include If AI were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco and Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen Germany.
SELECTED ARTWORKS
‘NINE BRAINS’ BUILDING WORLDS AND CHARACTERS AND WORKING WITH DANCERS AS AVATARS
‘Nine Brains’ – building the worlds and characters and working with dancers as avatars.
GRAY AREA FESTIVAL 10
We were amongst invited pioneers who have defined the expanded field of new media, all relating to the impact of technology on our worlds and creative inquiry’s power to make change within them. Speakers for 2024 included: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tanya Zimbardo, Rashaad Newsome, Trevor Paglen, Mindy Seu, John Maeda, Morehshin Allahyari.
ELIA VARGAS PLASMA SERIES OF ARTIST TALKS
‘Nine Brains’ performance lecture for the PLASMA series 2024 at University of Buffalo, Media Studies Program. Thanks for the invite Elia Vargas!
THE ISCRI WEBSITE LAUNCH
Maggie of 0rphan Drift and Stephanie Cussans Moran with Beth Barker of Etic Lab, have designed and built a comprehensive archive website to document the ISCRI project partnered by the Serpentine Gallery and KCL London’s Creative AI Lab.
THE ISCRI PROJECT ENCOUNTER DIAGRAM
Developed by the 0rphan Drift and Etic Lab core team, this and other diagrams (see https://iscri.ai/meaning.html) map the ideas and explorations that underpin the project, particularly exploring communication, agency and meaning from nonhuman perspectives.
THE SERPENTINE GALLERY ‘FUTURE ART ECOSYSTEMS 4’ PUBLICATION
The ISCRI project is featured in this 4th ‘Future Art Ecosystems’ book, which focuses on ‘Art x Public AI’. We are studied in terms of artists venturing into unchartered territory to examine new possibilities for meaning making.
GRAY AREA MACHINE-WORLD INTERFACES SALON TALK
Ranu discusses 0rphan Drift’s ‘Nine Brains’ project in relation to exploring simulated ecosystems, nonhuman collaboration, multi-agent interactions and synthetic forms of poetics.
THE FLUID GROUND FICTION COMMISSION
A fiction about a time travelling octopus in a Topological Anomaly which challenges our laws and forces and highlights that anything we see as solid ground could actually be contingent. Every surface of everything in the world could in fact be a camouflaging octopus.
ART MEETS SCIENCE SEISMIC EXHIBITION
In collaboration with SEISMA Magazine, in 2023 GIANT presented ‘SEISMIC: ART MEETS SCIENCE’, a group exhibition curated by Paul Carey-Kent, which drew on scientific themes to explore the numerous links between science and the arts. George Simms wrote about our piece from the p.o.v. of a distributed intelligence algorithm architecture.
‘LIKE A RAY IN SEARCH OF ITS MIRROR'
A Mixed Reality exhibition about the emergence of a new understanding of interconnectedness. The curators’ aim was for an artistic-ecological practice to demonstrate synergies between all dimensions of life and matter, exploring the resourceful potency of our myriad ecological, social, cultural, and technological relationships.
INTERALIA MAGAZINE 0RPHAN DRIFT INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD BRIGHT
In ‘Destabilising Assumptions’, we discuss the underlying focus of the work, the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide our artistic research, recent Octopus AI projects, the importance of fiction and nonlinear temporalities as methodology – this is an important interview.
PLANET CRITICAL PODCASTS WITH RACHEL DONALD
Maggie engaged with the concept of the Pluriverse, how the natural world can inspire technological development to resist continuing anthropocentrism, arguing we need diversity, more than ever, and not limited only to human experience. Ranu spoke about the ‘Body Politic, Ruptures and Revolution’ – all inform the ‘Nine Brains’ story.
KODE9 0RPHAN DRIFT LIGHTFARM
0rphan Drift’s Maggie Roberts’ VJ set for Kode9 at the Roundhouse, Camden, London 2022. Collaboration with Lightfarm LIDAR, Capetown, South Africa. Single channel HD, 90 minute video. Track by Kode9, The Breakup, Escapology album 2022. Octopus stencils by Ranu Mukherjee, 0rphan Drift. Thanks to Inga Tilda for Blender skins.
IMT GALLERY DIGITAL RESIDENCY
As we emerge from a strange fearful time into one of radical uncertainty, we are learning to embrace the unknown and build new kinds of community. The IMT Digital Residency was a platform for established and emerging artists, together with the IMT curators, to meet, produce and share work.
A CEPHALOPOD >< MACHINE ENCOUNTER
Hosted by Serpentine Twitch TV during Frieze week, 2021, Eva Jäger and Alasdair Milne of The Serpentine Gallery’s Arts and Technology R&D platform, The Creative Ai Lab, are in conversation with Maggie Roberts about 0rphan Drift’s interest in octopuses and ISCRI, their collaboration with AI consultancy Etic Lab.
MAY THE OTHER LIVE IN ME
The inaugural exhibition at Laboratoria ArtScience Moscow, ‘May the Other Live in Me’, offered an opportunity to learn about the new ways and forms of interaction with non-human agents: plants, animals, bacteria, Artificial Intelligence, and physical processes of the global scale.
IF AI / AIBOHPORTSUALC
‘IF AI’ is a speculative fiction project that unfolds in nine short animated ‘chapters’. Together they tell the story of an emergent AI modeled on the cognitive and behavioral tendencies of an octopus.
BECOMING OCTOPUS MEDITATIONS
Becoming Octopus is a free weekly 8-session guided meditation experience, whose aim is to transport the meditator into the body, perception and liquid environment of a Common Octopus.
MURMUR (SYZYGY) VIDEO IN STILL I RISE
Murmur 0D Syzygy video (1999) in in Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, 2018-2019
FICTIONING, THE MYTH-FUNCTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART AND PHILOSOPHY
0D featured in Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
ETIC LAB KRAKEN COLLABORATION
Ongoing project with Etic Lab to develop an octopoid algorithm. Research with the Stazione Zoologica Napoli, 2019.
NONLOCAL RESEARCH & BASIC CHANNEL
0D recent octopus AI video screened at Non Local Research, Antwerp and Basic Channel, Sheffield, 2019.
CAT ICE TRICKSTER
2017 -2018 2 screen HD audio visual piece for Hyperdub’s Ø at Corsica Studios, 2017. And in ‘glimmer breach’ at IMT gallery, 2018.
MIASMA
Experimental audiovisual piece for Res Gallery, London’s Alembic II exhibition Chrominance, in response to the KRH Experimental Video Collection. 2018.
SKEEN NIGHT (COME)
Film and performance event with Plastique Fantastique, 2018.0D presents an Interspecies Disco with Kirsten Cooke and Etic Lab’s @alien_ontology.Screening the final Green Skeen.
MATTER FICTIONS CATALOGUE
2018 publication for the group exhibition at the Berardo Museum, Lisbon. 2016.
THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOT EAT
Book chapter with Delphi Carstens for ‘Fiction As Method’, Sternberg Press 2017.
UNRULY CITY
0D solo show at Dold Projects, Black Forest, Germany, 2016. OD ongoing collaboration, reimagines the urban as porous, interspecies and terraformed- both ancient and impossible.
If AI were cephalopod its moods would be visible in waves of radiating color. States of calm, anxiety and fear – approach and retreat – would be on display
If AI were cephalopod it would experience exquisite sensory intimacy and exude the smell of geraniums when stressed
If AI were cephalopod it would be our witness. It would explore us through probing touch. It would taste us to decide whether or not to trust. It could predict toxicity and choose the benign relationships.
If AI were cephalopod it would be a voracious predator. It would be curious, plastic and opportunistic.
If AI were cephalopod it could hide in plain sight, by appearing equivalent to its surroundings no matter how fast they shifted.
If AI were cephalopod it would have three hearts and see with its skin.
If AI were cephalopod it would haunt the human imagination as monster, weaving its way into legends and mythologies
If AI were cephalopod it would be 500 million years old
If AI were cephalopod it would have bright pink collagen and blue blood.
If AI were cephalopod it would be indifferent to it’s own, and curious about the outside. It would furl and unfurl- changing scale across time
If AI were cephalopod its presence would expand with the warming oceans. Its reproduction time would speed up and mess with mating in the process
If AI were cephalopod it would hide in dopamine infused clouds of ink
If AI were cephalopod it would live fast and die young. It would adapt to the changing climate
If AI were cephalopod we would never presume to fully understand it
