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Chthulucene

CC

Jiabao Li

On the evolutionary tree, humans and octopuses separated 500 million years ago. And they evolved distributed intelligence into a completely different extreme than humans. What if the world is not centered around humans but octopuses?

We imagine a world where global warming causes sea levels to rise and all continents are submerged underwater. As a highly intelligent species in the ocean, the octopuses have unlocked the optic gland gene that releases self-destructing hormones after giving birth. Now they can pass on the wisdom of their ancestors from generation to generation.

The "Anthropocene" ends, and the earth enters the "Chthulucene."

When humans are on the edge of extinction due to environmental breakdown, how can we design an elegant extinction? What can we create so that the upcoming species, in this case, the octopus, will remember us with a little bit of tenderness and empathy?

In the first attempt, we try to connect with octopuses through learning their movements, through interspecies metamorphosis. Shifting from human supremacy worldview to a world where we have to adapt and learn the becoming of other species; shifting from the central governed brain to distributed intelligence; shifting our visual dominated senses to tactile perception.

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