Re-Air: The Art World's Octopus Teacher

0:03Hi everyone, Ben here. It's the end of summer and we are deep into preparing for what promises to be a very busy fall. So we are taking this week off. In the meantime, this is a re-air of my interview with the artist Miriam Simun about her art workshop that guides participants into understanding what it means to think like an octopus. As I think you'll hear from listening, it's an episode I personally really got into, and it's been a favorite of listeners. I hear that in the last weeks of her show, Simone was swamped with new recruits for her octopus army. army.

0:45Miriam Simun:But if you can get a little bit beyond that or out of that, I have found and other people have told me that you access some other way of being in the world that I think is the reward for pushing through.

1:02I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

1:14Have you ever asked yourself, what do artists have to learn from the octopus? Maybe not. But the question is at the heart of the work of Miriam Simoon, who currently has an exhibition about her Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution at the Art Space Recess in Brooklyn. And it turns out the answer to the question is mind-expanding, almost literally so. Simoon's unusual art practice can be seen as part of a serious trend in recent years of artists exploring non-human thought of all kinds in hopes of shifting our troubled relationship to the natural world. For her show at recess, the centerpiece is actually a series of workshops titled How to Become an Octopus and Sometimes Squid.

2:05For these, Simoon guides participants through a two-hour program of psychophysical exercises she has developed over many years through collaborations with marine biologists, engineers, dancers, and synchronized swimmers. She's taught the method all over the world, and the description says the classes are open to anyone curious about cephalopods, new ways of sensing, and expanding the definition of self, which included me. I got in there to explore my cephalopod side, and we are going to talk about Samoon's art and what I got out of my experience in her workshop as well. Miriam Samoon, thank you for talking to me about this body of work.

2:50Miriam Simun:Thank you so much. Super fun to be here. So before we start, the most important question, the plural of octopus is what? Octopuses. Right. Okay. So very important. Something I know everyone at home is going to be asking. and now you've gotten one thing from this podcast, one practical thing, and now we're onto the far out stuff. So just to start, this artwork is about thinking like an octopus. What does it mean to think like an octopus? The first thing I'll say that I find really interesting is I think an octopus's thinking and feeling get a little bit more entangled than we like to think about the way we think.

3:34Miriam Simun:Although, of course, our emotions and our thoughts are super entangled, whether or not we always kind of admit that or work with that. But octopuses are amazing in that they really break the Cartesian divide. So this idea of mind and body just biologically doesn't work because they have neurons spread throughout the entire body. It's really hard to say, OK, this right here is body and this is brain. The other thing about them is that the neurons are in each arm and there's kind of a concentration of ganglia in each arm. And this means that the arms can make independent decisions of each other and of the main brain.

4:11Miriam Simun:So it's kind of this multi-thinking, multi-armed creature. Yeah, it's fascinating. In the video in this show, I think there's a quote that says that an octopus is sort of like eight giant independent, almost thinking for themselves tongues in one body, which is a very different way of thinking about what it means to be in the world. Is that sort of what interests you? Definitely. So the octopus, it's covered in suckers and they're chemotoxile receptors, which means that they can experience touch in the way we experience touch, kind of mechanically, but also chemically. So the way we experience maybe scent or taste.

4:51Miriam Simun:So imagine now what it's like to have these eight kind of independently deciding, feeling, tasting arms moving around and encountering the world. Yeah, and the other thing, something I took away from the workshop, you said the suckers are some of the softest material in the world, meaning that they're really intimate with their environment. And then because of this sort of multi-brained or consciousness that they have, another thing you wrote somewhere, you said uncontrolled movements by an object around you are usually a sign for a human that it is not a part of you. If you were an octopus, these distinctions would be blurred.

5:32So there's something in here, something that fascinates you about this other way of relating to the environment, a consciousness that's more in tune with this environment. Yeah.

5:40Miriam Simun:Yeah, definitely. And those words come from Peter Godfrey Smith from The Other Minds book. But consider what that means if different body parts of yours are making decisions that you might not be fully aware of. So then is that you or is that not you, right? And then when you encounter the world, maybe you also have a bit of a more blurry understanding of you, not you. And I mean, we are all entangled beings through breath, through water, through electricity also. And this is just like a biological instantiation of that that's much more intense. I'm really interested in considering this kind of way of thinking, being, encountering.

6:21Miriam Simun:How do we notice how much the world affects us and we affect the world? Octopuses are really having a cultural moment. It's been a big year for the octopus. And I was at the opening of your show at recess and you had an octopus scientist there. And the audience was just so engaged. They had so many questions about this fascinating creature. I know you were telling me just now that you had a workshop and 40 people came to this how to think like a cephalopod workshop. When did you first become interested in octopuses and why? Not just how to think, but how to become. Right, right. Very important.

7:00Miriam Simun:I mean, I had a kind of funny sideways introduction into these totally incredible animals. The fossil record is twice as old as the dinosaurs. They've survived from hundreds of millions of years. They have these kind of crazy cognitive and tactile and shape-tifting capacities. But the way I first started thinking about the octopus and the cephalopod, which is the class of animals that also include cuttlefish and squid, is when I was asked by Hiromi Ozaki to join the Media Lab at MIT, she asked what I want to work on. And I said, I want to think about how to evolve the human to encounter sea level rise.

7:34And this grows out of an interest of you as an artist. You have many works of artists that have often dealt with climate change and thinking about getting people interested in thinking about climate change in new ways.

7:46Miriam Simun:My first interest was just in the future. And so I come more from technology studies in a way. But at some point along the way, even if you're thinking about the future in terms of technology, like we can't avoid that the climate is in total crisis and it's going to be really different. So I'm quite interested in actually how like innovation and climate change braid together. Right. Sorry, but I got you off track from the Media Studies Lab. So you go to the Media Studies Lab to think about climate change. And then where does the octopus enter the picture? Yeah. So I wanted to think about like, how do we, instead of adapting our environment to fit our needs, how do we adapt ourselves to fit a changing environment?

8:27Miriam Simun:And then I was just there and everybody was asking me, what are you working on? And I told them I'm interested in figuring out how people can live in and under the water in better ways. And I just kept having this response of, oh, so you want to become a mermaid? So a very dismissive response to the engineers. Yes, exactly. And maybe after the 14th time somebody asked me if I wanted to be a mermaid, I got kind of annoyed and decided to go watch The Little Mermaid just because I was fascinated. Like, why is this the only cultural imaginary available to thinking about how to live in and with the water?

9:00Miriam Simun:So I watched Little Mermaid, which I watched as a kid, but didn't really remember and was kind of shocked to understand that the Little Mermaid is not a very exciting character, I would say. And the really exciting, powerful character is Ursula, which is half human, half octopus or Cecilia. And actually the Little Mermaid sells her voice and her fins for the prince. But who makes the trade and who has the power to make all this happen? It's Ursula, the sea witch. Right. So I got really interested in Cecilia's first, like in this mythology of this other way of being in the water. Sorry, what? Cecilia's?

9:32What is that?

9:33Miriam Simun:Cecilia is a mythological creature that's half human, half octopus. Knows something similar that you have the half human, half horse. New data to me. OK. And from the Cecilia's, I started thinking about the cephalopods. And then I just understood that there are these incredible creatures and the work evolved from there. But the way I got there, yeah, is in this kind of sideways way of Ursula and her charm. Right. So Ariel is going from the sea to the land, and you're more interested in going from the land to the sea, learning how to think like an aquatic being. And then how does that become this now many-year practice of expanding the thought of working with scientists and all kinds of other professionals, dancers, freedivers, about what we can learn from octopus?

10:19Miriam Simun:So I have to be honest. At first, I was in this amazing technical institution. And at first, I was kind of thinking about, okay, how can we change our genome to live underwater better? How can we adopt prosthetics? These kind of things. And a couple things happened. And first, I was kind of collecting all of the possible genomes from underwater creatures that we might want to speculatively enter into ourselves. And at some point, I felt like I was compiling a shopping catalog. And it just felt a bit extractive and weird to me. And so I started thinking about, OK, maybe I want to work with one animal in its whole systemically to think about how we evolved.

11:01Miriam Simun:And then the other thing that happened is I decided to go learn how to free dive, which is this contemporary sport of diving very deep and very long underwater. I feel like this is the real origin story in a way. Maybe that's true. So yeah, so I went to go learn how to free dive. When I got there, I could hold my breath for 20 seconds. I'm a bit claustrophobic. I was a smoker at that point. I would never have made myself do this if it wasn't for an artwork. But after a two hour training of learning all these different breathing techniques, I was able to hold my breath for two and a half minutes.

11:33Miriam Simun:And it totally blew my mind, right? That I have this capacity within my body to hold my breath, breathing was something I'm doing all day, all night that I wasn't aware of. And it just raised this question of what else can I do with my body as it already is that I don't know about, which kind of raised the question in terms of thinking about innovation and technological progress and being at a place like the Media Lab was this question of how do we know what we need to add on to our bodies if we don't fully know what we can do with what we already have. Right. So can I ask you, is this a science project for you or an art project?

12:08Is there a meaningful distinction between those things for you? Is it more about a metaphor, like what we can do with the metaphor of the octopus? Or is it really more like, how can we think like the octopus? What do we do with that scientific data?

12:23Miriam Simun:I don't ever think about it as a science work. I do think about it as a way to make knowledge. It definitely started as an artwork and weirdly became a life practice for me along the way, which I was not expecting and continue to be surprised by. When I say how to become an octopus or how to become a cephalopod, well, I'm interested in all the different ways of becoming, right? So there are formal ways, there are functional ways, there are cognitive ways. I'm also interested in what kind of human we become when we try and probably fail to fully become a cephalopod. You could think about it as a science experiment from the perspective of neuroscience, just in terms of the neurons that you use are the ones that build connections.

13:17Miriam Simun:And so the more you practice the kind of practices that we train in the How to Become a Cephalopod workshop, perhaps the more you develop those kinds of abilities. There is a whole category of art right now that's really about changing your way of thinking. Like the actual art happens inside your brain instead of like specific objects. And there are specific objects. There's a video in this particular show at recess. You've done all kinds of things. Then there's this workshop, which in some ways functions like performance art. But really the product is what's going on inside your head and the head of people there.

13:58Like changing the way one thinks is the artistic output here. And I think that's kind of an interesting genre of art that's a little bit different than performance art, say. And the other thing just to say, I think there's an interesting metaphorical thing where in order to develop this method, which we'll talk about in just one second, you've worked with a broad range of people from different fields. Maybe you can talk about that. I do think it's interesting that one of the things you want people to take away from the octopus is this idea of multiple intelligence, like different agents working together in one unit.

14:32And then the art practice itself is like bringing together these different fields into this one new container, which is this new octopus form of thinking.

14:42Miriam Simun:Super happy to answer that question, but first, just because you mentioned it, I'm so curious for you what happened during the practice. I think probably best to describe the practice. If you go to recess right now, you will see a video playing a screen, but really the center of the show, as far as I'm concerned, is a sort of blue fuzzy grotto that you've created. And that's really the stage or the place where you have these workshops, you have the option to change into a leotard. I did not, you know, I both, not sure it fit me and I don't know if I was there yet. And then you lead us through a series of exercises.

15:25I start with breathing exercises and move up to things that start with sort of coming to an understanding or describing the evolutionary origins of octopus consciousness and how they feel and experience the world It involves you blindly feeling about your environment with other people. And then you escalate through those series of exercises to different contacts with other people, mirroring other people, forming a kind of collective entity together. It's hard for me to describe. How do you think about it?

16:00Miriam Simun:I love this description. Thank you. Well, I'm doing my best. It's another way of thinking. Yeah, I really do think about it as a training, right? A training or a practice. It's something that the more you do it, the more kind of deeper you can fall into it. And also the more accessible it becomes to you in your kind of normal everyday life. It borrows from freediving, breathing, training. It thinks about the evolutionary ancestry that's inside of our DNA and kind of accessing that memory. It's working a lot with touch. It's working a lot with trying to distribute our intelligence or our decision making.

16:37Miriam Simun:So informing this collective with other people. finding moments and the openness to where you're not sure if the decision is coming from you or from the other person, or perhaps from this kind of third intelligence that emerges, which people experience in other ways. But I think movement is a fun way and the most natural way for me to access that. So that's the route I took. But I'm so curious because you said this idea of the art is happening inside the head. I would hope that it's not only inside the head, but also inside the body or like blurring a little bit this because one of the things we do practice is like trying to let our foot decide, for example, in how we move as opposed to always only thinking from the first, the brain and kind of directing the rest of the body.

17:24Miriam Simun:But I'm so curious. So for you, if you experience the art is what's happening inside your head, like what happened inside your head? Oh, Miriam, you know, I am a very self-conscious person, you know, and I think a lot of people I mean, I think this is sort of the contemporary condition for a lot of people. And maybe that's why there's so much interest in your workshop. I mean, I think I already mentioned that you were saying that 40 people there for the last workshop you did, which I can't even imagine in that space, 40 people, the massive tentacles that would be. What I was able to get out of the workshop is by the end of the two hours, I was just about able to see the edges of my self-consciousness, you know, to kind of like step out into a slightly different way of thinking to see how you're kind of setting borders around yourself, relationship to your environment and other people.

18:12I don't know if I would be able to totally escape that, but I think I got a deeper awareness of it.

18:18Miriam Simun:Well, you only gave me two hours, so come back for more. I mean, you know, the octopus is like a liquid creature. I mean, you talk a lot about the softness of the octopus as well as its multiplicity. And yeah, I've been thinking about it ever since and I don't want this to be too much about my own thoughts. But when you talk about the Cartesian duality, the mind-body duality, and think about yourself as kind of in a box looking out at the world around you, I did end up thinking a lot about how that's related to how we have hard bodies. We're vertebrates with a central nervous system as opposed to an octopus, which is a soft-bodied thing with a much more distributed intelligence, and sort of connecting those two things and thinking about how much of my consciousness is taken up by thinking about myself looking out on other things as an object to pitch myself against.

19:16So it's something I got out of the workshop, yeah, for sure. But I have to say I was pretty embarrassed the whole time. I I mean, it's very difficult to get out of your own head.

19:23Miriam Simun:Well, thank you for sticking with it. I do ask people to move in different ways and relate in different ways. And it can feel weird and it can call up self-consciousness. But if you can get a little bit beyond that or out of that, I have found and other people have told me that you access some other way of being in the world that I think is the reward for pushing through. But what I'm really interested in what you were saying, that the self with the hard boundaries of the skin, of course, the skin is porous. And then you have like nose and mouth and things coming in and out all kinds of ways. But also just thinking about like how we come together in groups, how much the energy, personality, psychology of the people we're encountering actually does affect the way we think, present, operate, function, right?

20:12Miriam Simun:We are fundamentally social creatures. I think we're more and more expected to kind of define ourselves in a singular way and be consistent, almost like a brand. And I'm really interested, in fact, how we have so many different parts to ourselves and can function in so many different ways. So part of what I want to do in the training and what I try to do is open up the space for people to experiment a little bit and understand that who you are is also totally dependent to who else is in the room and how they are.

20:53how do people react normally i mean we're talking about this a little after the workshop i went to and i just really wonder i think in a certain sense in general the average person you encounter in new york city is very inside their head you've done this with all kinds of people i know all around the world do people freak out what kind of feelings come up for people when they're going through this kind of training?

21:17Miriam Simun:Some people freak out. I try to be very gentle and go slow. And I've had some feedback from people that they were surprised at how far they went because they didn't think that it was possible. That is why I like to go slow. But I've had all kinds of responses. Somebody last night said that they had a profound moment with playing with a suggestion I gave at some point of, for example, noticing your impulse and just trying out doing the opposite. So it's just little switches of attempting to be in another way, to shapeshift in another way, right? Like shapeshifting is one of the amazing capacities that cephalopods have, or opening to all the ways that we communicate that it's not through words.

21:58Miriam Simun:Things like that continue to come up for people as moments where something really clicked for them. But for sure, for some people, it can be difficult work because just generally dropping into your body, sometimes you become aware of things that are bothering you that you've been ignoring for a long time, emotions and things. And of course, like coming into contact with other people, with strangers can be difficult. And I like to say that in the octopus arms, there's always that one arm that doesn't want to play and is hiding in the corner of the tank. And that that is also an important part of the organism.