by William Kherbek // Sept. 12, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Weird.
0rphan Drift is a collective of artists based in the UK, which has taken many forms over the years, intervening across media, genres and forms of research. The members, too, have changed over the collective’s multi-decade lifespan, but in its current form, Ranu Mukherjee and Mer Maggie Roberts are directing the research into novel ecologies. If 0rphan Drift as a project has a guiding impulse, the notion of receptivity seems to be among the most powerful drivers of their works. It is a receptivity to the new, the strange and the points at which the boundaries of understanding break down. Recent works include the sprawling, transmedia piece ‘Nine Brains,’ in which the artists explore the octopus as a being and as a methodology, attempting to reckon with an epistemology and a form of consciousness that diverged from mammals on the evolutionary tree long ago. Octopus Mind is only one of the intelligences 0rphan Drift considers in the work. Significant in ‘Nine Brains’—among other works—is the presence of another incipient form of cognition: Artificial Intelligence. Among the questions ‘Nine Brains’ poses is how the human mind, the octopus mind and machinic forms of cognition may come to understand—and misunderstand—each other.
Coming to terms with the ways in which the alien and the weird can be vectors of growth for humanity as a species is an urgent concern, as narrow speciesist ideologies are pushing our cohabitant species, and the planet itself, to the final precipice of ruin. Comfort with the alien and the weird will no longer be an exercise in intellectual and empathetic expansion, but a necessity for survival as we make our home planet strange to us. The conversation with Roberts examines the value of learning from, with and through beings who exist beyond our immediate ken, demonstrating that for those with organs of receptivity, there is much to hear.
0rphan Drift: ‘Thank you to the Octopuses,’ 2018- // Courtesy of 0rphan Drift
William Kherbek: Could you speak to us about your choice of the octopus as an artistic protagonist in ‘Nine Brains’ and in other works? What interested you in the octopus as a being and as a subject?
0rphan Drift: It goes back a long way. There was a group of us, all women in the early days, who were kind of a hive mind in terms of producing and visualizing the work. We often thought of ourselves as tentacles in something that was 0rphan Drift, this strange attractor, or zeitgeist moderator, or channeller. The octopus has been kind of a methodology but also a talisman, or motif or symbol for the way we wanted to work, in that it has these eight arms that are independently intelligent of each other but are also controlled by a central processing unit when needed.
Around about 2018 we were thinking about the ways—inadequate and neoliberal ways—in which AI machine learning architecture was taken for granted in how it was constructed, by whom and for whom, and that we had a lot of ecological underpinning to our reasons for being these days. We were also thinking about the power of collective and individual imagining of different futures. Those are two things that broadly underpin recent works.
There was this idea, this essentialness, of an octopus being enmeshed with its environment, that made us really feel AI’s flattening of what constitutes reality from its data feed. There are so many ways in which environment is erased from what machine learning understands as reality and with that goes a lot of complexity and unknowability. The octopus is literally absolutely enmeshed in its environment, it moves water through it as it gathers information from all its particles and so many things in the water: pressure, chemistry, the residue of lives.
There’s also the very interesting thing about camouflage, how the octopus becomes—beyond mimicry—the terrain it’s moving over, or it expresses it; the papillae muscles make all the shapes and textures of what it’s moving over. And then the colors: the various four layers of cells in the skin and muscle control what pigment is showing. They’re reflectors of frequencies in light that we can’t see.
Another reason for octopi was that they’re so alien. We can imagine something of mammals’ lifeworlds, temporality and needs, but an octopus is in an environment we can only inhabit with lots of prosthetics.
0rphan Drift: ‘9 Brains,’ Kelp Forest prototyping, 2023, Blender animation still // Courtesy of 0rphan Drift, VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw
WK: Speaking about the alienness of the octopus and the connection you make with AI, there is the question of knowability, that what humans encounter in relation to it is a “black box.” How do you think about these kinds of epistemological limitations in the works?
0D: We were becoming increasingly interested, through the Interspecies Communication Research Initiative (ISCRI) with Serpentine, about whether meaning could be generated between AI and other lifeforms. We weren’t distinguishing between synthetic and other lifeforms. We were trying to think about what the human’s role there was: are we facilitators? Are we making the artwork that we would be showing the octopus onscreen to get reactions, under water? Would we be learning about its perceptual visual reality or would we just not understand their meaning-making? There’s [Thomas] Nagel’s book ‘What Is It Like To Be a Bat?,’ part of this well-documented and interesting field [of cross-species perceptual thinking] but one of the challenges as artists has to do with the limits of our imagination, trying to stretch them. I think we’re really interested in trying to stretch people’s imaginations, make them doubt the fixities and the limits of representation and perspective. Octopi completely challenge, for example, figure-ground relations in their camouflage. In figure-ground there’s a central important thing, like here’s me in a room, but I’m meant to be the focus; I’m distinct from the room. So much of what we do is trying to unpack a bit of what representation could be changed into.
0rphan Drift: ‘9 Brains,’ 2023, Coral Reef prototyping, Blender animation still // Courtesy of 0rphan Drift, VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw
WK: Is there a sense of using weirdness or alienness as a mechanism for learning?
0D: I’d say that was a fairly long-term 0rphan Drift criterion: to be open to weirdness, or to what is not necessarily articulable within linear language. We always try to think from the inside of something. A lot of the earlier work was exploring glitch and rupture and what happens if you disrupt or overplay the taken-for-granted technics of a particular medium—like, say, analog tape—to mess with the magnetic fields over and over until you get this unreadability of image. There’s the Deleuze and Guattari concept of “faciality”: we recognize a rabbit in a cloud or whatever, we still look for representation everywhere. Simon Reynolds wrote about us in one of his books, about the eye being reduced to this jellied orb that was vibrating, our visuals were so textured and running at such different speeds and simultaneous different emotions. We’re really into excess, unprocessable information, the body as the first site of knowledge.
Ranu Mukherjee, the other main 0rphan Drift co-channeler these days, had this book by Amitav Ghosh called ‘The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,’ and this was one of the books for me that really catalyzed ways to question representation. That links us to how AI works out pixel likeness and builds these very fixed representations of things, that’s the goal. Deleuze, however, talks about the crisis of imagination, how we can’t imagine a different future in ways that are useful. It’s apocalyptic, or we have no agency, or it’s just flights of fancy. Ghosh is talking about Indian epics where writings and portrayals of animism are really important, it’s a key code for building stories. In these narratives, the elemental is a character and humans aren’t the central focus; there are all sorts of beings and entities that all have agency in an epic story. Another book that was very key for me was Donna Haraway’s ‘Staying With the Trouble,’ which is about how it really matters what stories we tell, what details were involved, what questions are asked, and that gave me hope for building a methodology for imagining differently and representing self as an experiment, to see what could be represented that we might not recognize.
0rphan Drift: ‘Becoming Octopus Meditation 8’s AI Octopus avatar,’ 2022, VR simulation // Courtesy of 0rphan Drift, VFX Supervision Megan Bagshaw
WK: In exploring the ways in which animals, humans and technology interact, I wonder where you might stand on the question of whether technology is actually helping to create ways of understanding or whether it’s hindering them. Is technology helping us decenter a species-supremacist outlook, or just creating another form of anthropocentrism, with Artificial Intelligence creating false forms of certainty?
0D: I’d say: all of that. There’s another massive Deleuze and Guattari insight for me of “and, and” instead of “either/or.” That for me is the thing I try to live by. I was just talking to someone who was despondent about how art can make any difference at all in terms of engaging with the rapidly increasing ecological, planetary and computational crises running through our lives and determining what reality is, as well as the dystopia of young people being lost in phones, feeling like they’ve got no agency in this insane world.
I don’t know how one begins to address the enormity and the singularity (possibly) of large language models and what that’s doing to what it means to be human. Some of it is positive. I’ve organized a lot of workshops at Central Saint Martins with future-casting experts around how AI or LLMs change how we read, how we gather knowledge, how we think, how we understand and how that could be really amazing, if we engaged deeply with a model of intelligence that is not human and if we learn to expand and question differently. This is what we were doing by trying to get so deeply into octopus and other less ubiquitously world-ruling alien intelligences, but I’m pretty scared about what the future holds. Some of the younger people I talk to who are coders are doing very visionary training, trying to undo or intercept bias, which gets trained so early in the [computational] system; it’s there so early on it’s frightening. I really believe we need to engage with this technology because it works at such a different speed from the human experience and it’s moving so fast that I don’t know that anyone really knows what’s happening.
