0ctoGANN: A fiction

0ctoGANN is an experimental fiction, operating through multi-sensory imagination, that draws on my experiences of freediving in the Great African Kelp Forest off the coast of Capetown – home to the common octopus – together with an ongoing commitment to refiguring AI. The writing emerges from imagining into the lifeworld of the octopus, made possible by my immersion in the ocean flows and surges. It is a call to (western) human-centric perspectives to embrace knowledge-gathering through embodied intelligence, and to consider how AI might be trained on the decentralized distributed somatic tendencies of the octopus rather than on current corporate marketing/surveillance agendas. It is also a paean to this protean, incoherent (to humans) and experimental creature, living in a constant state of change and fluidity. 0ctoGANN is certainly an expression of hope for the contemporary world, though not necessarily human.