Animal Influence I - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Introduction
An animal without a backbone that can walk
upright on two appendages is an affront to
human exceptionalism. But there are eight-armed
invertebrates that can do just that—octopuses
from Indonesia and Australia that move bipedally
on sand. Instead of their regular crawling motion,
individual octopuses stride on one pair of arms,
drawing the other six arms around their body to
remain disguised. It is believed that Octopus
marginatus is mimicking common coconuts
rolling along the sandy bottom.[i] A walking
coconut. Besides being the first evidence of
underwater bipedal locomotion, these octopuses
live in an area with an abundance of coconuts
THE CASE OF THE MIMIC
OCTOPUS: AGENCY AND
WORLD MAKING
Mimicry involves a relational history between a creative, alive body, its perceptual abilities, and the environment it
finds itself in. To claim the lived experience of space and wear and perform it over time is mimicry. One can show
and act space by changing shape, colour, movement, and behaviour as wondrous examples of octopus mimicry will
demonstrate. Space is relational to place and to potencies known and unknown by human beings, from gravity to
the texture of substrates to other more-than-human beings nearby with their unique sensory capacities.
Text by Leesa Fawcett
… and try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms and like books
that are written in a foreign tongue.
And the point is, to live everything
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually
without noticing it,
Live along some distant day
into the answer.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
58
floating along the sea floor, so they can walk their
coconut way out of trouble. Beyond that, there
are species of octopuses that can climb out of
the sea and walk on land, as fish have done since
time immemorial.
Part of my larger project is to radically
question/alter who gets to count as a subject in
relations (i.e. octopus), and how that reworks the
material relations of production and
environmental and social justice. Questions
surface, float, walk, crawl and sink across wavy
disciplinary boundaries.
I assume that philosophy (questions about
existence) and biology (questions about living