We train cephalopod sensitivities and capacities through psycho-physical exercises that help us to enact new ways of being with ourselves, with each other, and with and in the world.
WHAT DO WE TRAIN?
01
TACTILE & EMBODIED COGNITION
SEEING WITH YOUR SKIN
Octopus suckers are made from some of the softest biological materials we know of, which allows them to get as close as possible to what they touch. They are also chemo-receptors - they sense chemicals - as we do with our sense of smell and taste. One experiment by MJ Wells found that the suckers on an octopus are 100 times more sensitive than the human tongue. Imagine, your entire skin-body is a tongue - but 100 times more sensitive. We learn to see with our skin, as well as attend to the wave of sensations inside our bodies, developing both tactile perception and interoception.
02
SHAPESHIFTING CAPACITIES
HYPER-AWARE HYPER-RESPONSIVE
Cephalopods are masters of camouflage, altering their form, texture, and movement style to trick predators and prey, and also to communicate with each other. While humans ability to change colors is limited, we learn to develop a hyper-local awareness of our immediate environment, as well as the ability and fluidity to quickly re-orient, adapt, and shape-shift the self for best resiliency in the emergent environment
03
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE
BEYOND NEGOTIATION
BEYOND COLLABORATION
TOWARDS SHARED COGNITION
Octopuses possess a radically decentralized nervous system, with the majority of their neurons residing in their arms. Some say the octopus is a single organism with 9 brains. From another perspective, we can say it is nine organisms housed within a single skin. How can multiple humans come to inhabit a single organism with distributed sensory and decision-making capabilities? How is cognition located in the network that spans bodies and environments? Beyond negotiation, beyond collaboration: towardS shared cognition.
DRY vs WET
DRY, INDOORS
Introductory sessions are always dry, and usually indoors. This can be any space where we can lie down and move around. Sessions have happened in conference rooms, dance studios and cinemas.
DRY, OUTDOORS
Outdoors things start to get even more interesting. We use our heightened awareness and new relational sensitivities to engage with the natural and built environment, with lots of attention to the more-than-human world.
WET, IN CALM WATER
Wet sessions are the most fun. We practice in another gravity, inside the soothing, alien-yet-homecoming space of water. We add in further techniques from freediving, watsu massage and cephalopod behaviour.
CUSTOM CONTEXTS
We've led workshops at the foot of waterfalls and inside restaurants at family reunions. A powerful way to learn an environment, group of people - in radically new ways. We identify the best context depending on the session goals.
WHO IS IT FOR?
INDIVIDUALS
Anyone curious about new ways of sensing and listening; expanding the definition of self; and cephalopods. No prior experience with cephalopod mimicry required—just an open mind and a willingness to experiment and play.
TEAMS
A team building practice unlike any other, the workshop centers the development of distributed intelligence - shared sensing and decision making capacities. It also helps team members pay attention to non-verbal cues, maintain and respect boundaries, and get to know each other in completely new ways.
FAMILIES
It was the incredible Kollek, who requested a workshop for his 80th birthday, that showed how transformative this work can be for families. No talking - just listening with the entire body. We learn and relate to each other in radically new ways.
STUDENTS
Hundreds of students have participated in the workshop to date. It operates on two key registers: developing relationships and intimacy within the group; and developing individual's perceptive abilities, with a demonstrable effect on writing, drawing and cinematography practices.
HOW TO PREPARE?
Workshops last 90-120 minutes. They can be one-off sessions, or a series that builds.
We work alone, in partners, and as a group. Please wear clothes you feel comfortable moving in, be prepared to take off your shoes and spend time on the floor. There will be an invitation to come into touch with yourself, your environment, and the others around you.
For those with physical limitations, working in a chair is also possible. For specific disabilities please reach out ahead of time and we will find a way to accommodate. This work is not about *doing* any specific thing, but rather about finding new ways of *listening* and *relating* with the body - and thus we can be highly flexible, and find the ways that work.
WHAT PARTICIPANTS SAY
“I learned to be more aware of what the people around me need - and I want to stay in touch with this.”
DELILAH T.
Start-Up Founder
—
“In a span of a couple of hours, my students had embodied abstract concepts that transformed their spatial, haptic and visual perception. There was a palpable difference in their awareness of, and responsiveness to their surroundings after the workshop. This was visible demonstrated in the video work they produced”
CARLOS M.
Professor
—
“ I thought it was very powerful to feel like as a group, and not as a person. And in my own life, I will remember that - to not think only about myself, but how to think about myself as part of the group. That we should respect other people as much as ourselves because we are the same body at the end."
JULIAN R.
Sail Boat Captain
—
“ Miriam, to my complete surprise, was able to engross even the most reticent students in the group—students who for weeks, had only marginally participated in class activities!
Not only did they become fully absorbed into the training, their overall level of engagement in the class increased and intensified due to this experience. Students continued to reference the workshop throughout the semester, noting newly recognized forms of embodiment and attention to non-human living things in their environment."
BARBARA A.
Professor
“ I really enjoyed the evolution of going from being a deep sea worm to having octopus suckers. I noticed that just through the workshop prompts it felt like I was moving in a new way.”
JUSTINE L.
Consent Trainer
—
“That was wonderful – I didn’t get to stay more than 40 minutes but I became jellylike, appreciated my mollusk-like tongue, siphoned breath up and out, thought about eyeless worms being feeling and motion, and entered an oceanic state."
CAROLINE J.
Professor
—
“I’ve studied animal behavior for 20 years, and our 90-minute workshop was the first to provide the experience of being another animal, as well as identifying the biases I bring with my human-centered viewpoint. It was truly transformative.”
DOUGLAS B.
Scientist
—
“I started the workshop in an isolated and negative mental space and in just an hour or so felt my solitude and doubts melt away, as I rediscovered my body and escaped my mind. The subtle progression through Miriam’s training welcomed me into a new movement practice with ease and openness. I especially appreciated the focus on both individual discovery through breath work and touch and communal discovery through mirroring and the conjoined hand activity at the end.”
IZZI W.
Student
PAST WORKSHOPS
UNIVERSITIES
MIT School of Architecture
CAMBRIDGE, USA
New School for Social Research
NEW YORK, USA
École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
PARIS, FRANCE
Parsons School of Design
NEW YORK, USA
Rietvelt University
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
Technical University of Munich
MUNICH, GERMANY
FAMILY GATHERINGS
Kollek K. 80th Birthday
COSTA DA CAPARICA, PORTUGAL
CONFERENCES & FESTIVALS
Waking Life Music Festival
CRATO, PORTUGAL
Berggruen Institute
Embodied Machines Gathering
CAMBRIDGE, USA
Body IQ Somatics Festival
BERLIN, GERMANY
Hypnos Cinema
MALMO, SWEDEN
PracticeSpace
CAMBRIDGE, USA
Area Madera
PALERMO, ITALY
MUSEUMS & ART SPACES
Bogota Museum of Modern Art
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA
MIT List Center for the Visual Arts
CAMBRIDGE, USA
Carpintarias de São Lázaro
LISBON, PORTUGAL
CtrlShft
OAKLAND, USA
Headlands Center for the Arts
SAN FRANCISCO, USA
Onassis Foundation
ATHENS, GREECE
Gyoki3 Art Incubator
SOPOT, POLAND
LMCC Artists Residency
NEW YORK, USA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is deeply indebted to many creatures - human and non, living and passed.
ITCE was born through transformative encounters with Ana, the Giant Pacific Octopus who lived in the New England Aquarium in 2016, the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus who lived at the California Academy of Sciences in 2017, and Savannah White, freediving trainer at East Coast Freedivers.
The original psycho-physical workshop exercises were developed in collaboration with the choreographer luciana achugar, and inspired by her longstanding Pleasure Practice.
These exercises were further developed in collaboration with a group of scientists and engineers at MIT - Alexi Choueiri, Jad A Elmourad, Daniel Estandian, Mary Gray, Neriman Beste Kaygisiz, Jacqueline M Montante and Sara M Sime.
The work dove underwater with a group of sychronized swimmers from the ImagineSynchro team: Valentina Dieujuste, Zoe Frost, Kirsten May and Daria Vasilchenko. The wet training practice was expanded in collaboration with dancer and bodyworker Nirvan Navrin.
The practice further evolved through participation in a number of somatic practices, with incredible practitioners, including Anna Halprin, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (developer of Body Mind Centering), Anita Chari, contact improvisation, watsu massage, and different nervous system regulation and meditation techniques.
The thinking evolved in dialogue with the voices and writings of Peter Godfrey-Smith, Karen Barad, Joe Dumit, Vilem Flusser, Donna Harraway, Jennifer Mather, Astrida Neimanis, Stefanie Hessler, Rolf Pheifer, Brett Grasse, Roger Hanlon, Hasan Hujairi, Mustafa Faradan and Julia Litman-Cleper, among others.
As any adaptable living thing ~ we continue to grow, evolve, survive...and more voices and bodies are coming into the picture.