2020, lecture performance, video (HD), sound, script
Courtesy the artist

“My granddad was a holy man. He used to ask me who my favourite saint was. He said you could tell a lot about someone if you knew that. So I’d say Kraken, because I wanted to be a good boy, and that was the right answer to most . . . religious questions. And he’d say, No, that’s cheating. Which saint? I couldn’t decide for ages, but suddenly one day I did. I told him. Saint Argonaut, I said. Really? he says. He wasn’t angry or nothing, he was just, like, surprised. But I think he liked that. Really? he goes. Not Saint Blue-Ring? Not Saint Humboldt? They’re your fighting saints. He said that because I was big like him and everyone knew I was going to be a soldier. Why Saint Argonaut? he goes. Because of that pretty spiral it makes, I says.” (China Miéville, Kraken, 2010)

In his lecture-performance Cephalopod Folklore, Thomas Hawranke weaves scientific, literary and audio-visual sources into a live-speech: from the misrepresentation of cephalopods in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea via the formation of a kraken religion as a thought experiment to the game of 10 arms in the dark abysses of the oceans. In recurring form, Hawranke asks the audience questions, which search for a potential, transversal cephalopod aesthetics and raise objects of examination to Gods.
The performance is documented here. Yet this precisely blurs the exhibits documentary character. By making both the lecture itself and the literature it draws on accessible, we are taking Hawranke’s place. The arms are already spreading. The references in the top-right corner on the screen allow to trace the texts on the screen to the books they are derived from on the shelf above. From reference to reference, from chapter to chapter, from thought to thought, immerse yourself ever deeper into an octopian world.

Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher teaching at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, whose installations and experimental set ups address the effects of technology on society (animals implied). He has been a member of the artist group susigames since 2006 and co-founded Paidia Institute e.V. in 2009, which promotes computer games as art form. He publishes, lectures and gives workshops regularly, among other things on animal characters in computer games, and exhibits internationally, for example at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, File Festival, Sao Paulo, File Game Festival, Rio de Janeiro, WIRED Los Angeles, and transmediale Berlin. — www.thomashawranke.com