The following description comes from the event organizer.

Join the Henry and the University of Washington's School of Art + Art History + Design for the 2022 Critical Issues Lecture Series! Taking place on Fridays during Winter quarter, the series is held online and open to all. Attend weekly sessions alongside degree-seeking students to learn about contemporary art and ideas directly from the makers. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision, since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In its latest manifestation, 0rphan Drift considers Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus – as a distributed, many-minded consciousness. Inspired by embodied cognitive science and radical anthropology, their multiple channel installations suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools such as LIDAR scanning to suggest new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kind of bodies might be possible with these new coordinates. Currently they are working toward deepening their engagement, involving direct encounters with octopuses and working with 3D animation and VR designers, an interspecies communicator and marine biologists. A major new collaboration called ISCRI (Interspecies Communication Research Institute) with Machine Learning Consultancy, Etic Lab, partnered by the Serpentine Gallery, London's Creative AI Lab, aims to develop an AI trained by its responding to an octopus reacting to video artworks and interactive 3D printed sculptures in a Mesocosm ocean-like environment. 
0rphan Drift works have been included recently in the exhibitions May the Other Live in Me at Laboratoria Art Science, Moscow; Monitor: Surveillance, Data and the New Panoptic at ICA Maine, OR; The Archive To Come at Telematic Gallery San Francisco; This Is A Not-Me at iMT Gallery London; 0rphan Drift and Friends, Public Records TV NYC; Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK; Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon; Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or; Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY, and in the book Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Solo exhibitions include If AI were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery, San Francisco, and Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen, Germany.

Image: Dozie Kanu, Chair [ xv ], 2020. Courtesy of the artist.