0(rphan)d(rift>) Articles

Interview by Richard Bright
Interalia Magazine 2023

The collaborative artist as avatar 0rphan Drift (0D) has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision since its inception in 1994. It was co-founded by Maggie Roberts, Ranu Mukherjee, Suzi Karakashian and Erle Stenberg in London. It 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 recent years 0D has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness.

By Alasdair Milne
Written for the Serpentine Arts and Technology R&D platform, The Creative Ai Lab’s Frieze week’s Serpentine Twitch TV event with Maggie Roberts of 0rphan Drift.

Fragmented patterning and colouration warp and pixelate along a CGI tentacle: imagery produced using Blender by a specialist team of VFX and visual coding artists portrays the ‘chemotactile’ senses of an octopus. The visuals on display here are, however, only part of an expansive art-and-technology research project. Further, these visuals are not ultimately intended for a human audience. ISCRI, or Interspecies Communication Research Initiative, is demo-ing prototypes that will provide the initial attempts to engage the interest of an octopus interlocutor. Over the course of 2020–21, the artistic and technical team behind ISCRI has produced artwork for an octopus, whom they hope will in return help them create a deviant form of artificial intelligence (AI), by coordinating a new type of multisensory encounter.

by Betti Marenko
The 2018 AAAI Spring Symposium Series
The issue I explore with this position paper concerns dominant cultural scripts around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the need to imagine different narratives in light of machine learning’s autonomous performativity. The aim is to offer a philosophical reflection, not only to sidestep narratives of techno-determinism, dystopia and existential risk to mankind, but also to speculate on how to imagine a (more) benevolent AI based on uncertainty and the co-evolution of humans and technology. The paper presents the speculative methodology I call FutureCrafting: a forensic, diagnostic and divinatory method that investigates the possibility of other discourses, equally powerful in building reality, constructing futures and having tangible impact. FutureCrafting is speculation at the juncture of design and philosophy, pivoting around the open-ended figuration of the what if…? It articulates collaboration rather than competition, coevolution rather than antagonism, and privileges the indeterminate and the imaginative. To conclude, the paper makes reference to the non-human intelligence of the octopus and to how this can inform a more imaginative AI.

by Maggie Roberts
Hashtagging felt the most appropriate form with which to communication with an algorithm. Mark Jackson of iMT Gallery writes about this text:
‘Hashtags are ways of translating themes and motifs into language that computers and algorithms understand. As such they seem to be a reaching out to AI. They also have a mysticised trait for drawing together images, sometimes with unexpected results. And lastly, there are people on instagram (for example) that use the language/form of hashtags for communicative effect, suggesting a “new generation” of post-internetees who are becoming robot compatible.
This is a word-hoard of hashtags. With special intention to include those that make reading hard (human reading that is)’. 

by Maggie Roberts
This text was generated as a fictioning experiment in which an octopus meets the synthetic intelligence of an AI seeking suitable embodiment. It part forms the basis of 0D’s OctoAI research, and features in the IF AI were Cephalopod exhibition catalogue (2019) and is performed in several Interspecies Disco iterations (2017 -2019). Thanks to #alien_ontology and Etic Lab’s Interspecies Ontological Research Software for generating the #alienembody and #aliendisclosure sections.