Join visual artist Maggie Roberts, co-founder of the art collective 0rphan Drift, as she talks about her recent work considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus.

About the speaker

Maggie Roberts has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision throughout her artistic career, mostly with the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift, which she co-founded in London with Ranu Mukherjee in1994.

In recent years she has been considering Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus - as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. 0rphan Drift’s multiple channel video installation If AI Were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco, and her Arts Council England funded IMT Gallery Becoming Octopus Meditations, both suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception and  address human exceptionalism’s limited understanding of ourselves in relation to other kinds of life, whether as the distributed intelligence of the octopus or the synthetic architecture of an AI.

Maggie currently teaches Fine Art Critical Studies at Central St Martins, UAL and is a Senior Research artist on the Ai Design Labs, Royal College of Art, London.