Can an octopus appreciate art? The answer could change how you see the world

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During the past few weeks, I have had Covid (claimed by some to have originated in a pangolin or in a Chinese lab studying animal viruses) and have read articles about the destruction of the seabed through bottom-trawling, Asian hornets’ threat to Britain’s bee population and what the Sycamore Gap tree-felling verdict means for nature.

Glance at the news and it is impossible to miss our entanglements and codependence with innumerable organisms and creatures. In response, artists, writers, architects and designers are increasingly seeking to emphasise humility and fragility rather than placing humans at the heart of everything. 

An upcoming play at London’s Royal Court, Cow | Deer, for instance, seeks to “evoke the lives of two animals” through a performance that uses “only sound and no words”. Recently at the Venice Biennale, landscape architect Bas Smets filled the Belgian pavilion with plants, carefully monitoring their needs so that they are able to temper and control the environment. And opening this week, an exhibition at the Design Museum seeks to understand “a growing movement of ‘more-than-human’ design”.

“We’re looking at the world through this net-zero agenda now but it is quite a limited framework, effectively carbon accounting,” says Justin McGuirk, director of the Future Observatory research programme at the Design Museum. “But there’s this whole other side: our relationship with the natural world. We need new narratives — carbon is important but it is not enough.”

More than Human is about those narratives. From bird-safe glass for buildings to artworks for animals, it is about design beyond ourselves. “Design is quintessentially human-centred,” McGuirk says, “and we want to ask: what if humans are not at the centre of every decision? What if design could be something that helps other species to flourish?’’

It’s a shift that has been in the ether for a few years. In his 2022 book Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence, artist and writer James Bridle tells the striking story of Otto, a six-month-old octopus. An unsettled resident of the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Bavaria, Otto became famous for rearranging the contents of his tank “to make it suit his own taste better” and occasionally smashing rocks at the glass walls in anger. The aquarium suffered a series of mysterious short circuits, the power suddenly cutting out when no one was around. Otto was found to be responsible for this too. He was observed on camera swinging himself up to the top of the tank and squirting water at the lights above, blowing the circuits. The bright light apparently bothered him.

This creature, with its tentacular tendency to interior design, displays of frustration and invention, is held up as an illustration of another kind of intelligence that has evolved differently to our own yet in which we recognise many of our own characteristics. Along with goats that can predict volcanic eruptions, bees that can communicate complex flight paths to pollen through dance and trees that sustain and nurture each other, Otto is a fine example of Bridle’s contention that, facing environmental catastrophe (and the rest), we have much to learn from nature in building our future. 

Octopuses appear at the Design Museum too in the work of Japanese artist Shimabuku, which revels in a playful attitude to the cephalopods, a joyful blend of research and communication in which he “gifts” glass balls and vessels to the creatures for their mutual amusement. 

Another example of benign human-ecological intervention seen here is the Melbourne-based Reef Design Lab’s ceramic Modular Artificial Reef Structure, an elegant system designed to rebuild the bones of coral reefs damaged by overfishing — an architecture for marine ecosystems. The project utilises a 3D-printed mould and slip-casting to recreate the “cellular structure” of the reef, fostering coral and other aquatic life. It’s a modest, if more realistic successor to utopian San Francisco design studio Ant Farm’s cult project Dolphin Embassy (1974) — a floating lab to initiate communication between humans and dolphins, and whose unrealised plans are also included. The Dolphin Embassy suggested a shared research space on equal terms, an astonishingly radical proposal, albeit one that proved prohibitively complex and expensive.

Among the works in the show, which spans folk artefacts such as corn dollies and woven fish traps to building materials that incorporate spaces for other species such as Johanna Seelemann’s bird and insect-friendly urban facades, is an unmissably vivid tapestry by designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. I went to her London studio to see a part of it and was thoroughly seduced, even though it was not designed for people. Ginsberg’s intent was to attempt to interpret how pollinators see. 

“It was originally a garden designed for the Eden Project,” she tells me, the Pollinator Pathmaker intended to address the massive decline in their numbers. “I thought it would be more interesting to make a kind of sculpture for insects rather than about them. So I had to begin to understand how insects see.” That has its challenges. “Bees can’t see red,” she tells me, “but they can see ultraviolet.” Some insects, she says, possess 15 types of photoreceptor, “which is incomprehensible to us. Our view of a landscape is not the only view. Perhaps if we could see more like them we could develop a degree of empathy.”

The result is astonishing, a psychedelic shroom-dream of a surface that ripples with colour, pattern and texture, still identifiably a meadow but made magically monstrous in scale and hue. The tapestry is part of a larger project to remake gardens, which includes a tranche of (real) gardens spanning from Cornwall to Berlin (so far) aimed at appealing to the most diverse possible cross-section of pollinators, from bees to birds. She calls it “the world’s largest climate positive artwork” with a self-deprecating grin. “You can download a digital PDF with an edition number and plant your own garden. It’s like the anti-NFT.”

Listening to nature was once understood as transgressive in western culture. Demons and witches were said to be able to metamorphose into animals, and animism was seen as a dangerous remnant of paganism. Today we are again beginning to understand not only that everything is connected, but also that there is no nature that has not somehow been affected by us, whether indirectly or through deliberate intervention. Even the great wildernesses such as the Amazon are believed to be the results of millennia of cultivation, shaping and forming them to better suit our own purposes. Now that we have changed everything, might we consult, or at least consider, the many millions of other species on Earth?

July 11-October 5, designmuseum.org

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