PORTALS: Closing for the Institute for Transhuman Cephalopod Evolution

Recess's Session program presents the INSTITUTE FOR TRANSHUMANIST CEPHALOPOD EVOLUTION (ITCE) founded by interdisciplinary artist and researcher Miriam Simun.

In a future marked by polycrisis brought on by rapid climate technological development and climate change, ITCE is dedicated to evolving the human species based on the role model species one the oldest and most adaptable class of animals on planet Earth: cephalopods - octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish. Through research, education, and experiential programs, ITCE seeks to expand the boundaries of human perception and intelligence.

Join us for the closing of this project featuring a series of performances and readings that enact portals by ITCE friends and co-conspirators at Recess. How can soup become a portal? Soup will be served.

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Since its birth in a London squat, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination has been committed to dissolving binaries of all kinds. Known for stirring up mass civil disobedience, the group has been walking the tightrope between art and activism since 2004. At the core of their practice lies a fusion of creation and resistance, protest and proposal - interwoven like strands of DNA. The Labofii now inhabits the zad of Notre-dame-des-landes, 'a territory lost to the republic,' according to the French government, where an airport project was abandoned after a 40 years of struggle.

Their presentation will tell stories of two decades of artactivism and how the labofii deserted the city and the binary dualistic concepts of art as we know it, to return art to its true ecosystem, life.

AVR

Swimming In a Pool of Split by AVR, performed with Bimbi

Bitterness isn't something you are naturally born with. It is an acquired skill. In a moment of indecision, diving in a pool of split is sometimes inevitable. Two actors perform the play using both movement and dialog. Swimming in a pool of Split explores merging of love that turns into horror that turns into magic and that sometimes has the taste of loving like a landlord.

Barnett Cohen

Barnett Cohen will present an excerpt from an upcoming performance that spans the continuum from aggression to embrace. will share some new and recent poems that twine intimacy and aggression into one touch.

Joel Kuennen

Moonshine, 2025 What is it about the light from the Moon that changes how we think, that alights us from ourselves into a contemplative world of gesture, longing, and desire? What is in the diffused pale light of the Moon that alters us so, that makes poets of us all? Oh how many lovers have gazed at the moon projecting their bodily desire upwards in hopes that it may bounce off our companion back down into the eyes of the other.

Moonshine is a series of handheld ceramic “mirrors” created for a performance to mark the closing of Miriam Simun’s exhibition Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution at Recess Art in Brooklyn, NY. They make use of traditional Summerian sculpture techniques and a novel glaze formulated using sand that once made up a beach during the Cambrian epoch, when cephalopods first evolved on Earth.

Acknowledgements

ITCE was founded by Miriam Simun at the MIT Media Lab, Design Fiction Group. The foundational work was created under the guidance of choreographer luciana achuagar, with the participation of scientist, engineers, dancers and synchronized swimmers, and in conversation with cephalopod husbandry expert Bret Grasse, philosopher Peter-Godfrey Smith, and in deep indebtedness to Vilém Flusser, Karen Barad, Astrida Neimanis, among many others.

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For most updated project details while ICTE is at Recess, click here for more information and additional programming.

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