Memo Akten: Distributed Consciousness learning resource

Teachers, students can use these questions to guide them as they look closely at this remarkable artwork. Encourage them to respond in writing to 2 or 3 questions from both the Observe and explore and Analyse sections.

When you next visit ACMI’s centrepiece exhibition The Story of the Moving Image, you will be dazzled by Memo Akten: Distributed Consciousness – an artwork featuring strange and colourful AI-generated tentacular critters on display in the special gallery near the exit of the exhibition. Through colour, light, reflection and sound, these strange critters make a big impact.

During a 25-minute sequence, 256 unique images of multi-coloured octopus-like creatures are presented on eight separate screens. These screens are mounted on reflective pillars in a room lined with mirrored panels. Visitors can see themselves and the artworks displayed in an infinite pattern of reflection, such as you might have in a hall of mirrors in an amusement park.

Adding to this intense and strange experience, you will also see AI-generated text scrolling high above your head and hear this text spoken by a mysterious computer-generated voice.

Note: Akten coded his own customised software to produce these images and related text.

But what is all this about? What does ‘distributed consciousness’ mean?

The artist Memo Akten was inspired to create this work when he saw an octopus sitting on a rock close to the surface lit up by the sun. He says: “It flashed at me the most intense colours, and the vividness of the pink, green, purple, yellow, orange, cyan, just completely blew my mind.”

Having had his interest sparked by this special moment of discovery, Akten started thinking about how octopuses connect with his art and philosophy. What captured his imagination was that octopuses are not only incredibly intelligent, but their intelligence is distributed through their body. This is what he discovered:

“each arm is able to act independently, even communicating directly with each other without informing the central brain. Each arm is semi-autonomous, able to move, touch, taste, smell, and respond, even if severed from the body. With each arm having 'a mind of its own', the octopus has a kind of distributed intelligence.”

Akten is very interested in different forms of intelligence and ways of perceiving the world. As he thought about octopuses’ brains and how differently they process data about the world around them, he saw that there is a parallel between their ‘distributed consciousness’ and distributed blockchain computation. He also began to wonder how his observations about different forms of intelligence might connect with his interest in artificial intelligence and the challenge AI poses to human thought and identity.

Akten observes that, by placing human intelligence at the centre of existence, humans have come close to destroying the world, and that we should instead look for productive connections across the spectrum of “all human, non-human, living and non-living things”.

The best artworks encourage us to ask questions rather than giving us simple answers. However, you may be interested to know that one of the ways that Memo Akten gives meaning to his manifesto of connectedness is to create his works on an energy efficient blockchain platform called Tezos.

If you can't make it to ACMI, you can get a wonderful sense of the different elements of Distributed Consciousnesshere on the artist's website.