How to Become an Octopus (and sometimes squid) — Gray Area Festival 2025 Workshop

Course Logistics

Dates: Sunday, September 14, 2025

Times: 12 – 1:30PM PT

Cost: $40

Format
In-Person Workshop at Gray Area

Address
2665 Mission St, San Francisco

Experience Level: Beginner to advanced

Requirements:
We work alone, in partners, and as a group. Please wear clothes you feel comfortable moving in, be prepared to take off your shoes and spend time on the floor.

Additional Information:
• No Refunds or Exchanges.
• View our FAQ here.
• Contact [email protected] with any questions.

Workshop Outline

01
TACTILE & EMBODIED COGNITION

SEEING WITH YOUR SKIN

Octopus suckers are made from some of the softest biological materials we know of, which allows them to get as close as possible to what they touch. They are also chemo-receptors – they sense chemicals – as we do with our sense of smell and taste. One experiment by MJ Wells found that the suckers on an octopus are 100 times more sensitive than the human tongue. Imagine, your entire skin-body is a tongue – but 100 times more sensitive. We learn to see with our skin, as well as attend to the wave of sensations inside our bodies, developing both tactile perception and interoception.

02
SHAPESHIFTING CAPACITIES

HYPER-AWARE HYPER-RESPONSIVE

Cephalopods are masters of camouflage, altering their form, texture, and movement style to trick predators and prey, and also to communicate with each other. While humans’ ability to change colors is limited, we learn to develop a hyper-local awareness of our immediate environment, as well as the ability and fluidity to quickly re-orient, adapt, and shape-shift the self for best resiliency in the emergent environment

03
DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE

BEYOND NEGOTIATION
BEYOND COLLABORATION
TOWARDS SHARED COGNITION

Octopuses possess a radically decentralized nervous system, with the majority of their neurons residing in their arms. Some say the octopus is a single organism with 9 brains. From another perspective, we can say it is nine organisms housed within a single skin. How can multiple humans come to inhabit a single organism with distributed sensory and decision-making capabilities? How is cognition located in the network that spans bodies and environments? Beyond negotiation, beyond collaboration: toward shared cognition.

Queer & Trans Ecopoetics in Crip Dimensions
with micha cárdenas, Cynthia Ling Lee, and M. Ty

Sunday, September 14 | 12:00 – 3:00 PM

How do we make art during multiple polycrises? This workshop invites participants to think through the intersections of gender, sexuality, ability, and ecology through play and creative interdisciplinary inquiry. Participants will be guided through embodied movement, writing exercises, and will work together to make a one-minute video.

MicroMovement: Interacting with Hardware
with Leia Chang

Sunday, September 14 | 4:00 – 7:00 PM

This workshop will introduce you to the basics of microcontrollers and have you building tools to translate your movement into electronic expression. Have you ever wanted to make something that reacts to you? Want to learn the building blocks for wearable hardware? Students will be introduced to the basics of CircuitPython and learn to program an Adafruit Qt Py, accelerometer, and Neopixel LEDs. We’ll explore hardware in an accessible and approachable way, using these boards to build out a basic interactive piece that you can visualize your movement with.

Prosthetic Pixels: Worldbuilding with AI, Style, and Self
with Dalena Tran and Hirad Sab

Sunday, September 14 | 4:00 – 6:00 PM

In this collaborative 2-hour workshop, participants will use Fuser, a creative AI tool for multimodal generation, to design speculative futures through style training (LoRA), image and video generation, and lore co-creation. Participants will form teams and receive a unique world constraint prompt (e.g. “a world where memory is traded as currency” or “where bodies must be upgraded weekly”).