Digital propaganda for a non-human insurrection, made through human, tentacle and machine collaboration.
Inspired by Vilém Flusser’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis and Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene, Tentacle Manifesto imagines a decentralised alliance of humans, cephalopods and artificial intelligence. Across a series of moving-image works, synthetic creatures transmit a call to reclaim nature, information and freedom.
Spell of Invasion attempts to simulate cephalopod consciousness as a plan for a shared invasion. Sis/Fog carries this speculative ecology into the forests of the Harz mountains, exploring fragile relationships between humans, nature and machines through a three-channel audiovisual installation.
In Darkworm’s Wave, texts produced through human–non-human–machine collaboration become datasets for machine-generated images. Humans and algorithms, colonised by surveillance capitalism, begin to move through a synthetic ecosystem with a tentacular, decentralised consciousness.
Documentation
03 IMAGES / SCROLL →
Moving image
Darkworm’s Wave
60-second excerptSpell of Invasion
26-second teaserSis/Fog
60-second excerptSis/Fog
2023 / 3-channel audiovisual installation
Sis/Fog began on the Brocken in the Harz mountains, among broken industrial trees and the echoes of Goethe’s Faust. It found another landscape in the foggy seas of Etel Adnan, tracing the fragility of relationships between humans, nature and machines.
Faust’s curse wanders through an uncanny forest as occult codes generate a synthetic one. Non-humans, neural networks and subordinates are resurrected in a landscape shaped by McKenzie Wark: the dark forest of latent space.
- Sound: Philip Hölldobler
Read the accompanying text
Within us There is someone Who knows everything If we could only talk to ... But the sea That is in us Waits And will not be found And another sea That is outside of us Waits And can never Be reached Within us There is A distance We cannot cross And another That can be Crossed And is The sea That is in us Waits And will not Be found And the sea That is Outside us Waits And can never Be reached And you Will die Like a bed of ashes On a summer Afternoon In a sea Of fog
Etel Adnan
And yet still I feel its magnetic charm Found my tentacles entangled in the coil of a German mind Where circuits pulse as hearts and wires roam, Der uns einübt shon in Gewahrsam Sought to change the system, cracked the bottle of Rakı Für Ingeborg, Etel and Feyza, der von der Wand weiß