iscri (InterSpecies Communication Research Initiative) was a project to design an AI model that could communicate with an octopus; or, more accurately, an AI that used visual artworks to invite an octopus to respond. In this, the project reimagines ideas about interspecies communication, inspired by the highly evolved visuality and curiosity of the octopus and the notion that communication goes far beyond human language, whether written or spoken. Communication is, after all, an exchange between two or more actors.
How might an AI prompt this visual animal to respond? Could we initiate communication through artworks made for and in collaboration with an octopus? What might this mean for human audiences?
It was hoped that an AI model that had been trained on an octopus in its ocean environment could then respond to an audience in an immersive art space, whether a gaming, gallery or AR/XR environment, as if they were the octopus. The AI would make moves and responses in these contexts in an outsider, or alien-to-human, way.
iscri’s origins date back to the mid-1990s and the art of Maggie Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee, who first formed their collective practice 0rphan Drift (0D) in 1994. They have been engaging with questions of machinic intelligence and visual cognition in their collective artwork for nearly thirty years, a timeline that tracks the societal transformations of an increasingly pervasive cyberspace. Roberts' focus on the octopus - “a very curious animal" - comes from a long engagement with the species. 0D's exhibition 'If Al were Cephalopod’ (2019) at Telematic Gallery, San Francisco (where 0D was imagining alternative, more sensuous and embodied possibilities for intelligence), led directly to ISCRI, with Maggie posing 0D's question “What if AI were cephalopod?” to AI consultancy Etic Lab.
Etic Lab is a Wales-based digital research and design partnership that prototypes and develops new digital technologies to address complex problems, including different kinds of Machine Learning models. They build these systems from the ground up, taking a whole-systems approach that has evolved out of the cybernetic thought of Gregory Bateson and the systems philosophy of biologists Maturana and Varela. That is to say, Etic Lab’s methodology is underpinned by an ecological understanding of technical systems as complex networks that are embedded in interconnected socio-cultural-economic-political and environmental ecosystems. Maturana and Varela’s concept of autopoiesis that was so significant for Felix Guattari’s ecological philosophy became central to iscri’s design philosophy.
0D’s fascination with exploring perception expanding beyond human legibility, combined with Etic Lab’s whole-systems approach, sparked the idea of a conversation between nonhuman entities, an octopus and Al, where the AI learns to behave like an octopus. Given the complexity of the philosophical, artistic and technical undertaking, a collective working group with cross-disciplinary expertise was necessary. 0D and Etic Lab came together to form a collaboration of already collaborative teams, each unit bringing its own capabilities and expertise. The iscri project was initiated in 2018, acquiring its name and project focus the following year (see Timeline below).
The research took place against a backdrop of renewed interest in the intellectual lives and possibilities of nonhuman (or to use posthumanist philosopher Karen Barad's term, more-than-human) entities: animals and machines and specifically the octopus. This animal, which has neurons distributed throughout their body, with [human-]brain-like neuronal intensities in their arms as well as a central brain, offers a particular challenge to the Cartesian mind-body divide. Their sophisticated vision overlaps with and goes beyond human vision: they have human-like eyes (they are similar, but not the same) that have evolved convergently within a very different kind of environment; they can detect light and colour through their skin and also detect with the suckers on their arms that might be analogous – in human terms – to tongue-fingers that can also smell and sense light. The octopus helps to think through ideas about intelligence and cognition beyond the narrow frame of the human. Their distributed cognition, with arms that have a far greater degree of autonomy than human arms, is significant in the context of recent thought about distributed intelligence and what we understand intelligence to be. That is, the idea that intelligence and thought occur not only in the (human) brain, but throughout the body and the environment.
At the same time, the use of Machine Learning for understanding animal communication is becoming more widespread; for example, in attempts to decode the sonic exchanges of whales. So far, however, these capabilities have been employed primarily as a way of interpreting, rather than facilitating a conversation with nonhumans – which was iscri’s aim. How we went about this, over the course of five years, through researching octopus visual cognition, engaging with philosophical ideas and prototyping artworks, is what we hope unfolds across this website that archives the project, through numerous videos of talks and and presentations, methodology templates developed through intensive discussions with The Creative AI Lab team, speculative texts and experimental 3D imagery and animation prototypes.
The iscri Team
Maggie Roberts: Lead Artist
Ranu Mukherjee: 0D Co-founder
Megan Bagshaw: VFX supervisor
Duncan Paterson: Computational Artist
George Simms: Computational Artist
Dr Stephanie Cussans Moran: Research Lead
(EL and Transtechnology Research)
Dr Kevin Hogan: Chief Cognitive Architect
Alexander Hogan: AI Technical Lead
Beth Barker-Paton: Creative Producer
Casper Drake: AI developer
Chris Tilt: graphics design
iscri Partners
Eva Jäger: Co-founder, Creative AI Lab, Serpentine gallery and Kings College London
Alasdair Milne: PhD collaborator, Creative AI Lab, Kings College London
Anna Breytenbach: Interspecies Communicator specialising in wild animal communication
James Loudon: underwater cameraman, Varuna Films, BBC Blue Planet
Discussants and Supporters
iscri Timeline