Here you can read a selection of articles about the project, written by members of the ISCRI team and our partners at the Serpentine Creative AI Lab over the past four years.
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‘Wittgenstein’s Octopus, or, how to make a cephalopod AI’, a speculative fiction about how the project might have developed and the kind of context that would be necessary for its realisation (Cussans Moran, 2024).
“They’d pretty much given up on the project by then, written it off like an overripe pomegranate, to mix a metaphor. Or, not exactly written off; it had achieved some level of entity status on the plane of immanence at least…” -
‘Archive’, a retrospective overview of what the project achieved and how it has contributed to contemporary art and AI discourse, from the perspective of the Serpentine Creative AI Lab (Milne, 2023).
“Interspecies Communications Research Initiative—ISCRI—exists as a proposal: to bring an octopus into a temporary and reciprocal learning relationship with a machine learning agent…” -
‘Concept’, a brief retrospective overview of the project’s aims and conceptual underpinning (the iscri team, 2023).
“An AI that learns from an octopus in its environment; an experiment in aesthetic communication between octopus and human mediated by a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm…” -
‘A Cephalopod / Machine Encounter’, an essay about ISCRI published on the Serpentine Gallery website (Milne, 2022).
“How can an octopus, in an encounter with artificial intelligence, transform our understanding of technological development? Fragmented patterning and colouration warp and pixelate along a CGI tentacle…” -
‘The Octopus and the Artificial Intelligence, an article published in The Marine Biologist, the magazine of the Marine Biological Association UK, issue 19 (Moran and Roberts, 2021).
“The ecosystem crisis and current developments in artificial intelligence are raising ethical and philosophical questions about human primacy…” -
‘Exploring the Pluriverse: Fictioning, Science and Interspecies Communication’, an essay published in the online journal Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities (Moran and Roberts, 2021).
“We have been researching ISCRI for about two years now, as a kind of super-collaboration across two very different existing collaborative organisations, 0rphan Drift and Etic Lab…” -
‘The Meaning Diagram’, a diagram we all worked on for a meeting with the artistic director of the Serpentine gallery, Hans Ulrich Obrist, to describe the four intended phases of the project (ISCRI, 2021).
“A CO-CREATED COMMUNICATION SYSTEM THAT IS NOT HUMAN LANGUAGE BASED.” -
'ISCRI: Communicating Between Two Alien Intelligences Through Art'abstract for Maggie and Stephanie's talk at Art Machines 2: International Symposium on Machine Learning and Art 2021, Hong Kong. Published in the Conference Procedings.
"ISCRI is a collaboration between artists and Machine Learning technologists that aims to produce both new kinds of aesthetics and artificial intelligence (AI) through interspecies research." -
‘ISCRI: An AI Programmed by An Octopus’ a blog post about the early stages of the project’s art and AI research, with some images of the initial artwork prototypes (Moran, 2020).
“ISCRI is an exploratory artistic, scientific and technological project in collaboration with artist Maggie Roberts and her collective 0rphan Drift that will create an AI programmed by an octopus…” -
‘Pitch Deck: ISCRI, An AI Coded by an Octopus’, a document the whole team put together for funders and sponsors, introducing the project’s philosophy, conceptual basis and plan (ISCRI, 2020).
“If we could communicate with another distributed consciousness, how might that change what it means to be human?” -
‘Future Art Ecosystems 4’, a Serpentine Arts and Technology briefing focusing on art and AI that mentions ISCRI (Serpentine, 2024).
“Some artists, instead of looking inward at the internal operations of AI tools, look outward, building tools into more complex, operative systems for research or production…”