Sonhos tentaculares
2025
This speculative visual investigation into octopus dreams articulates neuroscientific discoveries, contemporary philosophy, and artistic creation mediated by artificial intelligence. Drawing from Sidarta Ribeiro and Sylvia Medeiros’ research (The Sleep of the Octopus, 2021), which identified REM sleep patterns in octopuses – suggesting they dream in short video clips manifested through rapid chromatic changes on their skin – the work explores a fascinating paradox: how can a being that creates the most spectacular colors on its skin be unable to see them? This speculative fabulation materializes in two visual series: “the octopus’s dream” and “the human dream with the octopus,” dialoguing with Donna Haraway’s tentacular thinking and Ursula K. Le Guin’s therolinguistics. The images were created in collaboration with Midjourney through speculative poetic prompts, while the haiku emerge from a creative dialogue with Claude AI (Anthropic). The goal is not to literally decipher the octopus’s dreams, but to create a space of respectful encounter with its radical alterity. In a context where human dreaming is “at risk of extinction” (Ribeiro, 2024), this experimentation invites us to imagine other ways of dreaming, fabulating, and coexisting with non-human consciousness. A techno-poetic collaboration between Karen Caetano, Midjourney and Claude AI.
AI Context
The artwork “Sonhos tentaculares” uses artificial intelligence as a poetic mediator of an impossible encounter between human and non-human consciousness. Through MidJourney for visual creation and language models for textual elaboration, AI acts not only as a technical tool but as a partner in speculative fabulation about the dreams of the octopus. The algorithms “hallucinate” visualizations from prompts that translate neuroscientific discoveries into a sensitive language, while the poetic texts emerge from collaboration between artist and AI. This technological sympoiesis (making-with) questions the boundaries between human and non-human creation, proposing artificial intelligence as a translator of inaccessible languages and expanding imaginaries of consciousness, otherness, and shared creation between species and machines.
Karen Caetano
Brazil
Bio
Visual artist and photographer investigating memory, feminine identity and layers of time. Works with performance, digital montages and visual experimentation, exploring fragmentation and body persistence. Author of photobook Zona de Conflito (Editora Origem). Participated in national and international exhibitions, including ProAC 2023 project. Master’s student in Design (UAM/SP), CAPES scholar.