0rphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts) introduce the project they’ll be developing during the digital residency. It’s called Nine Brains and it’s an animated speculative fiction that unfolds in nine chapters.
It tells the story of an emergent AI modelled on the cognitive and behavioural tendencies of an octopus. The purpose of this AI is to expand planetary interspecies communications, open pathways of embodiment and better understand how collective and individual entities exchange energy and create power. The work’s about building differently imagined future/s.
8 of the 9 animations are each conceived of as an arm (over half the octopus’s neural network and cognition is distributed through the 8 arms) and the 9th explores the central processing brain that assimilates information from all the others.
So the nine chapters are simultaneous events, and will be exhibited simultaneously.
RELEASE #2
IF AI / AIBOHPORTSUALC
IF AI / AIBOHPORTSUALC by 0rphan Drift is the first chapter completed of a nine part series called ‘If AI’. It deals with the sense of claustrophobia, confinement and limited range of motion that speaks to our current moment.
IF AI is a speculative fiction project that unfolds in nine short animated ‘chapters’. Together they will tell the story of an emergent AI modeled on the cognitive and behavioral tendencies of an octopus. The purpose of this AI is to expand planetary interspecies communications, open pathways of embodiment and better understand how collective and individual entities exchange energy and create power.
As each arm of the octopus has its own brain while being connected by a ninth central brain, each ‘chapter’ in this work addresses a different condition of being. From the outset we conceive them as occurring simultaneously, though of necessity they are created sequentially.
You are watching a conversation about the making of this work and how it relates to the historical moment we are in, showing some of the elements that went into it.
RELEASE #3
BY MAGGIE ROBERTS
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 communities. Many artists are focused on expanding the imagination and challenging assumptions of how Reality is defined. In order to address the catastrophic consequences of global corporate capitalism, we think one important thing is to be really aware of other kinds of sentience and the need to respect all life – in a more animist way.
I’m hosting this session solo, and Ranu will do the same sometime later in the residency. I’m going to talk about imagining into the alien universe of the Common Octopus, made possible by spending the Covid lockdowns by the amazing kelp forests of the Capetown coastal waters. I’ll show some of the footage filmed snorkelling and working in collaboration with an Interspecies Communicator and professional underwater cameraman. Immersion in this lifeworld became a way of recalibrating my mind and senses to open to a new kind of embodied awareness of everyone/ everything (human, non human and synthetic) outside of my boundaried self – and contributes to how I think about all the octopoid behaviours we’re using as the narrative structure for Nine Brains.
RELEASE #4
THINKING FROM ANIMATION INTO VR,
IMAGINING KELP FOREST TO CREATURE
In Release #4, 0rphan Drift talk through their idea that Nine Brains may become their first VR work. They explore ink and watercolour as a speculative process and watery material, the importance of slipping between perspectives of being in something and being something, kelp forests, and as always octopus perspective.
RELEASE #5
AN AI FIND EPIPHENOMENTAL
AND REVOLUTIONARY TIME
AND MOVES BEYOND THE TIME OF GLASS
This title sequence for Nine Brains comes from a body of writing that fleshes out nine brains, as the story of an AI (called Luna) which encounters an octopus (called Zoo) while on a mission to learn from the kelp forests.
For Release #6 Ranu shares a sample cloth animation made in Blender with the help of animator Megan Bagshaw. Ranu has been working with sari cloth for several years, printing digital patterns onto
patterned sari cloth made on the jacquard loom. The digital patterns are
made by abstracting images of actions around environmental and civil rights. She considers the embedded patterns as futurist prayers and acknowledgement of the ongoing work and silent power emanating from these actions, even when they are not in the public eye. Ranu often works with jamdani cloth from West Bengal, a style of cloth that involves embroidering thick patterns onto a fine luminescent weave that is reminiscent of a screen. The digital melds into the woven, finding its originary technology in the jacquard loom. For Ranu, the cloth speaks of diaspora and migration as a constant maker of form and meaning.
For Nine Brains 0rphan Drift are working with Megan to develop animations in blender using these cloth prints, as a starting point for building a kelp forest in VR. The kelp forest is a primary set within our narrative, chosen as a space where cephalopods hang out, and as the object of much research due to its carbon sucking capacities. The cloth gives our forest a cultural dimension, refusing the possibility of a nature-culture binary read.
RELEASE #7
This is a short clip from Maggie’s vjing session with Kode9 at the Roundhouse, Camden Town last week, mixed to his track Breakup from his recent Escapology album.
We were wondering what to send for this next release, and realised that, being saturated in imagining 9 Brains in VR, her mixes for the Roundhouse set last week reflect some of the formal/spatial issues we are discussing around the evolving 9 Brains work. They continue to explore the themes of complex figure ground relations and planes enmeshed or floating off each other, that are present in Ranu’s last drop animation work towards visualising our 9 Brains story kelp forest. Between the depth of the LiDaR point clouds and folding skins, and the flat cut outs and their camouflaged partial disappearance into the surfaces they move over, spatial and temporal disorientations and a slippage between materialities are conjured.
A short Blender animation mixed with an EBSynth octopus arm experiment. Alongside writing a fiction for our 9 Brains project, we’ve been thinking about how to portray chemotactile sensing (perhaps the octopus’s main tool for mapping it’s environment). Maggie has been working with Megan Bagshaw, 0rphan Drift’s pole dancing VFX supervisor on this piece, to explore the particulate and vibrational awareness of octopus suckers.
RELEASE #9
Over the digital residency, 0rphan Drift project Nine Brains has evolved into blueprints for our first XR project.
Part of the work has been to write a fictional narrative based on the premise ‘An AI finds epiphenomenal and revolutionary time and moves beyond the time of glass’. The XR project will take a somatic approach to engage its audience/users. To plan for this, we have made an IRL performance score. For our last residency drop, we are sharing an excerpt for the score. We suggest you engage with a few people, or an AI reader.
