“ Distributed Consciousness ” is a multi-faceted work that spans themes of biological and artificial intelligence, distributed computation, distributed cognition, cryptography, evolution, phenomenology, ecological awareness, climate change, activism, and cephalopods.
The project began as an NFT collection on the eco-friendly Tezos blockchain . This was a collection of 256 (i.e. 2^8) unique cephalopod-like “Tentacular Critters🐙” created using custom artificial intelligence software (before tools such as Midjourney, Dall-e, StableDiffusion etc. existed).
Cryptographically hidden in each image was a surprise, revealed a month after the images were released: Every one of the 256 images had in fact some text cryptographically encoded in it – a Verse🔷, hidden amongst the pixels, invisible to the human eye, but readable by code. The entire collection of images is in fact a poem, a manifesto. And every Tentacular🐙 image is in fact one verse from the poem, one page from the manifesto. Furthermore, the entire text was also generated with AI. The manifesto is a huma