The ideas, research, and collaborations behind Octopolis.
Celebrating Collaboration! After lighting up the playa, Octopolis will be placed in the ocean as artificial reefs — transforming art into habitat and beauty into biodiversity. It's a bold fusion of creativity, sustainability, and ecological restoration — where what inspires us on land helps heal the sea.
In order to achieve these goals, Big Art has collaborated with the following outstanding organizations:
How the human perspective impairs our ability to actually see the octopus
Octopolis will be an absolute spectacle that bridges creativity, education, environmental responsibility, and long-term ecological impact. This monumental homage to the planet's most celebrated mollusc will start as an immersive art installation that will raise awareness and educate those who visit and engage with her about octopuses: their importance to their ecosystems, the conservation, and the many uncommon traits they embody. She will eventually make her way into the ocean she's representing to become an artificial reef that provides shelter for species, and offers resilience to marine life challenged with the loss of their habitats due to human cause-du-jour: coastal development, destructive fishing, resource extraction, climate change.
As I've contributed to this project, I've been contemplating the long, confusing, and fraught relationship human beings have with the octopus.
Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let's imagine a scene. You're living another life. Your time is deep into our past as a species and a blink of an eye in geologic time. You see the sun rise, engulfing a rocky coastline as golden rays ignite seaspray. You hear the gentle roar of water colliding with land in a soothing metronomic surge.
Places like this are confusing to you as an air-breathing land-dweller. They are hostile to life, battered by tides and sun, flooding with violence and inexcusable force that makes exploration a life-and-death matter. The contradiction of the puzzle surrounds you: life is tucked into every nook and cranny you see. Creatures of astounding variety cling to and crawl about the salt-battered crags. Today, you're the first person to explore the seashore — like, ever.
Carefully, you navigate a slippery path across loose footings and sharp, unforgiving rock. Surveying the rewards this risk brings the abundance of life here, means abundance of food for you and your people. With caution, you crouch down to investigate what bounty is to be had in these tidepools. Emerald grasses shimmer, half submerged in a landscape mottled with red, orange, brown, purple, and black. Small fish dart away from your shadow, seeking desperate refuge in intertidal pockets. Armies of crabs scurry below like ants, some battling each other, others scavenging the corpses of unfamiliar animals unable to escape the danger of the tidal blast zone. Thick orange stars grip rock crevices, their meaty limbs enticing your hungry belly, even as you question if it's safe to eat.
A large splash, on your right, startles you. The immobile star you've been eyeing up can wait. You head toward a large tidepool, still rippling in the morning sun from the source of the disturbance. Despite the pool's considerable size, open slopes and smoothed rim offer few hideaways, save for a corner at the deeper end shaded by a convenient rock outcrop. It's there, in the kindness of the shade you see the most curious thing. Overcome by the impulse to know, you wade into the knee-deep pool with all apprehension for safety abandoned. Bending down with slow intention to the water's surface, you gaze through glare and see two, unmistakable, knowing eyes locked onto yours. For a flash, you feel the powerful connection to something, someone, else until it is extinguished by a jet of water sprayed squarely between your eyes.
Stunned and bemused by the attack, curiosity overtakes your hunger. The water you're standing in is now jet black. The eyes, attached to a slimy and amorphous blob watch you as the creature slithers over land. It doesn't move like a snake though, rather, it crawls with many arms gripping onto the rock, their underbelly spotted with rings. It is walking away from you, moving toward the sound of the waves, probing on all sides with its arms — how many arms does it even have? — to find a path of escape.
You give a slow and quizzical pursuit, exhaling in astonishment when the armed blob propels itself into another pool close to the ocean's edge, one with a depth you don't care to discover. Its meticulous ambulatory locomotion over land dissolves in absolute grace and agility once submerged, safe again, below the water.
Those eyes lock onto you again while its head undulates and grows wide, flashing harsh red and oranges through skin once smooth, now dimpled and horned. The small blob completes an impossible expansion, outstretching eight menacing arms. As fast as the animal sprayed you in the face, it tucks all its arms together, narrows its head and disappears in the blink of an eye like a bird diving from the heavens.
Congratulations. You're also the first human in history to meet an octopus. And you have a problem: how the hell do you even describe what you've just witnessed and experienced to anybody else?
Returning to the present you, me, and the first human ambassador to greet the cephalopod delegation of Earth, are connected by more than our DNA. We all share the collective challenge humans, as a sentient species who fancies themselves quite intelligent, face when trying to comprehend the world around us. In particular, we struggle to know and understand the true nature of an animal as compelling as the octopus. As is our tradition, when people struggle to understand what they see we make up a tale that makes the most sense. Time and time again, those myths always prove laughably wrong.
All the monumental breakthroughs of science and advances in technology across centuries have yet to bridge the chasm between our perception and that of our cousins on the tree of life. That hasn't stopped us from trying, after all, attention and curiosity are among our greatest superpowers. The self-centered beings we can be, we investigate those which we find similar, like great apes. Or those who find it beautiful (and maybe envy because they can fly), like birds. Or those that inspire an awe of familiarity like cetaceans. Few other species, though, activate the curiosity innate in us like the octopus.
Octopus-mania has gripped us longer than we've had in written history. Show me a culture that lived near the coast or navigated the ancient sea and inevitably the octopus will appear as a not-insignificant figure in its folklore. Their eight arms have slithered into our hearts and minds and wrapped tightly around our imaginations for millennia.
In Hawaiian tradition, the octopus holds a revered status as a wise and ancient being, who is connected to ancestors and the creation of the world. Folklore in Fiji describes a giant octopus who is a guardian of the sea and that protects the harmony between humans and nature. In Japan, the sometimes benevolent giant octopus monster Akkorokamui is feared and worshiped, with offerings made in the hope he will bestow healing upon the faithful. Tlingit peoples, living in what is now Alaska, tell a centuries-old account of a battle between their ancestors and a malevolent octopus that was sinking their canoes.
Not to be outdone, in the 17th century the tale of the Kraken, a gigantic and terrifying octopus that sank whole ships off the coast of Norway, instilled fear in sailors and artistically manifested in the marginalia of cartographers. Then there are the ancient Greeks, who loved them some octopus. They immortalized them in art, on coins, and infused traits of the octopus into their mythology in characters like the hydra and Medusa.
The octopus has always elicited a magnetic pull on our curiosity because, when they're in the mood, they display a wondrous curiosity toward us. And that's where we first stumble: we don't offer reciprocal curiosity and respect to nature because we see ourselves as beyond nature.
The "father" of logic and science was also a prolific naturalist. His book, History of Animals, contains the earliest known writings about the natural life of the octopus and, boy-howdy, does Aristotle have some takes! At nearly the end of his tome, the learned student of Plato confidently concludes:
"The octopus is a stupid creature, for it will approach a man's hand if it be lowered in the water."
Building up to his diagnosis of "just plain dumb" in the ninth and final book of the volume, Aristotle made a number of, what modern science has since backed up, accurate observations about octopus behavior and biology. He documented: the dexterity of their bodies and arms; the motherly dedication to caring for their eggs; their ink self-defense system; cunning hunting prowess; land walking; and how octopuses mate.
Sending mixed signals after the world's first octo-negging, he goes on to compliment them as "neat and thrifty" for the manner in which they build and keep their dens. He also describes their ability to change color to blend into their surroundings when they hunt.
When he wrote this, Aristotle possessed the most octopus knowledge of any person on the planet. Processing the totality of all those observations, when challenged to write of a mind-blowing interaction with another species that demonstrates an intelligence and curiosity beyond our own, Aristotle jumps to, literally, a stupid conclusion.
Centuries later, the confusion and wild exaggeration of seafarers that may have witnessed a real giant squid collided with the blossoming field of zoology. As word of the Kraken spread in the late 18th century, Carl Linneaus, the person responsible for creating the way species are classified, included the Kraken in several of his works, calling it "singulare monstrum", a unique monster.
The leading minds in the early sciences casually mixed empirical evidence with their own bias, misperceptions, and speculation to burden the octopus with a monstrous and vicious reputation. The caricature created, however untrue, became the perceived identity of the octopus.
The most vivid, flagrantly inaccurate, and maybe most damaging depiction of an octopus in fiction comes from none other than Victor Hugo. Following the success of Les Misérables and inspired by his home in exile on Guernsey, Hugo transformed the octopus into a horrible face-hugging, actual-blood-sucking, pneumatic death machine. He called them among the most "concrete forms of evil."
The incomplete picture — painted by the free divers, fishermen, tide-pool foragers, philosophers, and trailblazers of science — was given a detailed resolution in the 20th century because of the invention of scuba diving and massive advances in laboratory science.
Octopus are molluscs, which are related to snails, slugs, mussels, clams, and oysters. They are cephalopods, which has Greek origins and means "head-feet". There are over 300 species of octopus swimming through all parts of our ocean, occupying important roles as both predator and prey.
They don't just use tools, they use tools with forethought. The discovery of octopus "cities" in Australia's Jervis Bay and massive undersea nurseries of thousands of nesting moms off California's Monterey Bay rewrote our belief that they lived solitary lives. The complex social interactions observed at these gatherings have experts investigating if they might have culture. The general display of intelligence pushes others to make a strong case for octopus consciousness.
Our scientific endeavors to assess their intelligence established that octopuses could: recognize people and objects; solve puzzles, mazes, and even the dreaded Rubik's cube; and escape, seemingly at will, from captivity. We learned they have individual personalities, with individuals described as shy, rambunctious, quirky, playful, or uncooperative.
If beholding an octopus, a person, any creature or thing on that reciprocal level were easy, you would not have spent your precious time reading my description of this conundrum. It's challenging because we need to decenter our own self-importance. Then we must release the motivation to know, or control, all and accept mysteries beyond the barrier of our individual minds.
Achieving both allows us to lead with curiosity and respect for what we don't understand and are unfamiliar. We can experience empathy for the shared qualities and struggles we observe. We're then open to embrace the fact that, at the end of the day, we're all in this shit together.
Being curious. Empathizing with octopuses. Appreciating them. Allowing octopus to simply be. Practicing these intentions can override the impulse to rationalize, intellectualize, and tell stories about them through the distorted human filter.
That's part of what we want Octopolis to achieve: reminding people of our connection to mother nature. The audacious interactive octopus sculpture, which will go on to support habitat resilience as an artificial reef, is a portal to inspire understanding, learning, and gratitude for the ocean world. It's an invitation to appreciate octopuses with open-minds and empathetic hearts, and use our own curiosity to see clearly our own reflection in these cephalopods.
Bringing that curiosity and that empathy will force us to face something truly fearful: the opportunity to shift our mindset and change behaviors from the reign of dominion to the responsibility of stewardship.
— Kevin Connor
Explore the Artificial Reefs Dashboard — tracking how art becomes habitat.
The Octopolis Newsletter
From the desert to the ocean floor — build updates, events, and the story as it unfolds. No noise, just the dive.