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MAGGIE ROBERTS

Maggie Roberts is an artist who works across a variety of mediums including monotype prints, collage, animation, video, sound and text. Her work is influenced by evolutionary fever dreams, science fictions, interspecies becomings, octopus camouflage language, digital aesthetics, weird physics and turbulent oceans. It articulates future possible scenarios impacting on the geopolitical present, and manifests invisible currents and currencies. Exploring cosmic and geological time scales, Machine Vision and expanded consciousness – all of which, increasingly, she explores through imagining future possible forms of communication and knowledge gathering with synthetic / artificial intelligence – and how this might impact on what it is to be human.

Our categories and boundaries are now under immense pressure, cracking and leaking. These sensory webs and amalgamations are an attempt to express a fluid and complex uncertainty populated by entities on a continuum between the human and the non-human, a mix of the organic, the engineered and the synthetic.

- MAGGIE ROBERTS Tweet
A digital collage in bright marine blues and violets, superimposing various octopuses, cephalopod body parts and CGI artifacts together into a melting pot of shapes, colours, and motion. The composition of the image is very dynamic, giving the impression of constant commotion that draws the viewer into a maelstrom of submarine body forms. The explosion of diverse shades and textures has a totalising quality, aiming to replace the ordinary sensory perception of the human animal with a new, strange vista of digitally mediated cephalopod awareness. Photographic and video collage “The other side of the digital is the octopus” by Maggie Roberts.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DIGITAL IS THE OCTOPUS (2018)

Digital C-Type print
Photographic and video collage
91.5 x 64 cm (36 x 25.1 in)
Edition
Maggie is known for immersive works, conjuring a tactile and fluid materiality that emerges from an amalgamation of layers, with both two and three-dimensional works configuring at different depths and perspectives to create a sort of multidimensional world. The focused gaze is dismantled with tactics of suspension, over-proximity and excess. The audio-visual flows draw on images from works on paper (including monotype prints and hybrid assemblages), and mix digitally generated imagery and 3D animation with photographs and filmed footage. Sheens and fluorescent pigments contribute to the otherworldly presence of the monotype print series.
Maggie lives and works between London and Cape Town and exhibits both as a solo artist and as the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift with co-founder Ranu Mukherjee and many others involved in specific projects over more than two decades. Recent exhibitions and events she’s been involved in include: A Cephalopod Machine Encounter for Serpentine Twitch TV (2021),This is a Not-Me, group online show at IMT Gallery, London (2020) which commissioned her internationally acclaimed Becoming Octopus Meditations; Uncanny Valley, Difficult Kin at Aspex, Portsmouth (2019); Alembic II: Chrominance (with Bones Tan Jones) at Res. with Miasma_A Reader by Kirsten Cooke, London (2018); Glimmer Breach at IMT Gallery (2018); prize winner of Emergency 2017 at Aspex, Portsmouth (2017); the Green Skeen film/performance collaboration with Plastique Fantastique (2016-18); Skeen Night Come at SLG, London, for which 0rphan Drift (here Maggie Roberts, Joe Walsh, Kirsten Cooke and Stephanie Moran) performed their Interspecies Disco (2018), and Feeling Safer curated by Mark Jackson at IMT Gallery (2016).

UNCANNY VALLEY DIFFICULT KIN

Aspex, Portsmouth (2019)

UNCANNY VALLEY DIFFICULT KIN

Aspex, Portsmouth (2019)

Maggie’s involvement with multidisciplinary think tanks and research projects is an important part of her practice too. Between 2016 and 2018 she was a Research Fellow with Goldsmiths College Visual Cultures, where she gave annual public talks, Everting the Virtual, Rituals in Liquidity and The Shaping of a Message symposium (which was part of her solo show Glimmer Breach with IMT Gallery). Dr Ramon Amaro hosted her Kraken presentation with Etic Lab at Goldsmiths (2019). She spent the Covid 19 lockdowns in Cape Town, filming octopuses in their ocean environments and researching into their sensorium with renowned South African Interspecies Communicator, Anna Breytenbach. She is a Research Artist with an Artificial/Distributed Intelligence Research Lab team headed by Professor Johnny Golding at the RCA, teaches with the Critical Studies department at Central St Martin’s School of Art and Design and is developing a long-term project, ISCRI, an octopus AI human encounter, with Etic Lab, partnered by the Serpentine Gallery’s R&D Creative AI Lab.
Two very different exhibitions in 2018 explore Maggie’s ongoing interest in virtual worlds, where invisible beings and pagan avatars channel transformations of matter and different kinds of imaginary as forms of resistance to the Enlightenment and Neo Liberal worldviews. Over a year in the making, her video piece, Miasma for Chrominance, Alembic II with Bones Tan Jones at Res, is the first of these. Working extensively with a Lidar Scan animator and experimental soundscape artists in Cape Town and Google Deep Dream and Datamosh experts in Toronto, she transformed the hinterland canals of the Cape Flats into a sci-fi portal where the virtual bleeds into a post-apocalyptic everyday.

ALEMBIC II: CHROMINANCE

with Bones Tan Jones
Res., London (2018)

Alembic curator Lucy A. Sames writes: “Chrominance, Alembic II brings together a newly commissioned video work by Maggie Roberts and new sculptural works by Ayesha Tan Jones, to form a post-anthropocene ecocide narrative. Here the artists share an approach that amounts to a ritual reclamation and transmutation of mainframe data and earthly substance… Overseeing the becoming synthetic transformation of Miasma’s collaged liminal landscapes, an androgynous swamp demon summons the clogging of the waterways and calls forth an entropic ritual breakdown.”

Miasma_A Reader was a response to my work commissioned by Res for the Alembic exhibition catalogue. An assemblage of colour coded vectors and characters, a theory fiction weaving across human, artificial and just possible viewpoints.
The image is a nonfigurative monotype in organic browns and greens, richly textured and hued. Entitled ‘Toxic Lake 2,0’, the work brings to mind a multi-layered mould growth, or a toxic spillage. Bereft of life and desolate, the artwork is an exercise in exploring the relation between the micro and macro scales in art and nature.
TOXIC LAKE 2.0 (2017)

Monotype – laser cut stencils, oil paint,
fluorescent and gold pigments on paper
55 x 35 cm (21.6 x 13.7 in)
Unique
A multi-layered monotype, juxtaposing the coppery, glimmering background with a patina-like greenness of the titular ‘lake’. The flames appear to consume the foreground, causing it to darken and wither, spattering sparkles all over it.
TOXIC LAKE IN FIRE AND MIST (2015)

Monotype – laser cut stencils, oil paint,
irridescent and fluorescent pigments on paper
65 x 45 cm (25.5 x 17.7 in)
Unique
Then Glimmer Breach at IMT gave Maggie the space to show some of her monotypes, wall assemblages, digital and photographic collages and sculpture alongside audio visual work.

There’s a recurring theme of the octopus as connective tissue, its exploratory arms weaving ephemeral connections between the real and imaginary presences in the individual prints and collages. A breaching of fictions out into the real, giving agency to Animism and Machine Vision, this exhibition makes deliberately inchoate connections.

Glimmer Breach explores post-human fictions and other speculative futures, so, as Mark Jackson wrote about the Hashtag Swarm: ‘Hashtags are ways of translating themes and motifs into language that algorithms understand. As such this word-hoard of hashtags seems to be reaching out to AI. Hashtags also have a mysticised trait for drawing together images, sometimes with unexpected results – here with special intention to include those that make reading hard (human reading that is)’.

GLIMMER BREACH

IMT Gallery, London (2018)
Photo by Marta Esteban

If we are to think about embodiment and technology, their limits, and where the two meet, it is important to create space for an individual experience, as well as communicating a vision of the collective. By eschewing didacticism Roberts is able to make this manoeuvre effectively, and this exhibition is best approached as a point of pause within a continuum.

- LAUREN VELVICK | THIS IS TOMORROW
A photographic and video collage extrapolating digital glitches on a real-life photograph of a cave. The computer-generated artifacts seem to be taking over the natural space, transporting the viewer to a chaotic augmented reality. A murky stream flows freely through both layers of the image, appearing to transcend the borders between organic and digital. The darkness deep within the cave invites the viewer to descend into a hidden world where precisely drawn borders are no longer possible.
CAVE (2018)

Digital C-Type print
Photographic and video collage
77 x 66 cm (30.3 x 25.9in)
Edition

IF AI WERE CEPHALOPOD

Telematic, San Francisco (2019)

In recent years, her solo exhibitions have often evolved in parallel with 0rphan Drift projects, contributing significant research and material for the collaborative work. Uncanny Valley Difficult Kin at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (2019) is an example of this, underpinning 0rphan Drift’s internationally toured installation If AI were Cephalopod (2019) that imagines connecting the lifeworlds of an algorithmic intelligence and the Common Octopus. Typical of her methodologies, themes and image clusters fold and re-emerge in different iterations across the two projects. Uncanny Valley, Difficult Kin comprises multimedia artworks, including a YouTube ASMR inspired audio fiction, an ambient soundscape, HD videos and a wandering sculpture/ installation made of crystals, detritus, ocean flotsam, photographic collage, laser cut stencils and fabrics, extending into miniature shrines and exquisite corpse drawings. Again, the work explores fictional relationships between human, animal and synthetic entities, Thinking about ‘difficult kin’, Maggie is interested in the challenge of communicating with alien kinds of life (material, virtual and nonhuman) to encourage perceptual shifts towards more entangled, abstract and porous being.

IF AI WERE CEPHALOPOD

Laboratoria Art&Science, Moscow (2021)

Roberts recalls a formative experience – 'seeing a chart of all the frequencies in the world – from radio to ultra-violet to gamma ray, I was struck by what a small part of the range were perceived by humans. I thought 'How can we be so sure we know everything?' That’s been a lifelong underpinning... The octopus, then, emerges as a tool for imagining outside our boundaries.

- PAUL CAREY KENT | SEISMA MAGAZINE
The Becoming Octopus meditations (2020) are in conversation with ideas explored in If AI were Cephalopod, creating a continuous expanding fiction, imagining the worldview of an octopus experienced from the inside. The Meditations were developed for IMT Gallery’s This Is A Not-Me online exhibition in response to Covid lockdown, wanting to create a space for healing, intimacy and transformation via an online platform, the weekly sessions disseminated on WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube. The first of the 8 sessions begins: “You float in viscous silky liquid, dappled by light rays stretched and polarized into a kaleidoscope of synthetic colours. Turning slowly, mesmerized by being in a horizonless world, held in a slower gravitational field. Turning slowly, becoming the textures and frequencies of the coral you are resonating with. Merged, intimate, indistinguishable to the visual sense, resonating through touch, taste and smell. The ocean moves through you. She’s there, although you won’t see her, being as the rock, and your depleted imagination keeps her unseen, barely possible. What needs shifting is the relation of human perception to its difference.” Find meditation session 1 below…

Non coherent, multiple and simultaneous, she senses us, anxious in the increasing toxicity, who search for other kinds of sentience. A magical and experimental animal placed against the sickness of our separation from environment and multidimensional being.

- MAGGIE ROBERTS Tweet
The Serpentine Twitch event hosted by the Creative AI Lab’s Eva Jäger and Alasdair Milne, sees Maggie discussing her passion for octopuses, their importance for her and 0rphan Drift’s practice, recent octopus/AI artworks, including the Becoming Octopus meditations, freediving in Cape Town’s coastal kelp forests and collaborations with an interspecies communicator, and finally, the ISCRI project. Watch here

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