Before AI There Was the Octopus
Helsinki-based artist Tuomas Laitinen gives us an intelligence with no central brain, no fixed shape, and no interest in being legible to us.
Helsinki-based artist Tuomas Laitinen's exhibition, Siphon, begins with copper. A decade ago, the artist set out to trace the material’s mythologies and geopolitics, and the trail led, improbably, to the octopus, whose copper-based blood carries oxygen through the deep. That conductive thread runs through the installation at Pioneer Works, where in the cavernous Main Hall, wall-scale projections of abstracted octopus skin flood the room in thermal magentas and molten ambers.
The imagery combines Laitinen's own footage with recordings of sleeping octopuses from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Bodies merge into a single churning terrain. An enormous pupil blinks back at the viewer from the screen. On a stepped plinth, water-filled tanks hold Laitinen's blown-glass forms, tubular and knotted, offered as shelters for octopuses. The 86-year-old ikebana (traditional Japanese art of flower arrangement) master, Kosen Ohtsubo, threads them with bare branches, pine, yard-long beans, and peanuts strung along wire, counterbalancing the heavy projections. Overhead, “8Eternal” (2026) sends Kenyan composer Nyokabi Kariuki's voice through eight ultrasonic speakers, narrow beams of sound that surface and vanish as you move throughout the space.
