Miriam Simun, Artist

Miriam Simun is an artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores recurring questions about interspecies relations and non-human intelligence. She just launched the Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution with free public workshops coming May/June 2025.

APOSSIBLE™ is a non-profit bringing psychologists, technologists, artists and creatives together to explore how technology can better support creativity and human fulfillment. In this ongoing interview series we’re discovering what people value, what makes their lives fulfilling, and what kinds of relationships to technology they already cherish.

1. What is a ritual, practice, or routine in your life that is important for your psychological wellbeing and/or fulfillment? Why?

The practice that has changed my life is TRANSHUMANIST CEPHALOPOD EVOLUTION (TCE). It is a psycho-physical practice for training human enhancement (in particular enhancing attention, perception, and interaction). We train sensory awareness and modes of being, based on the role model species of the cephalopod (octopus, squid, cuttlefish). It has transformed entirely the way I see, move and am in the world and with others.

TCE is a practice I developed while I was at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with the choreographer luciana achugar, and a group of scientists, and synchronized swimmers.

It focuses on training within the human, three main capabilities of the cephalopod:

(1) Seeing with the skin

(2) Shapeshifting: a. hyper-awareness of one’s hyper-local environment and b. self-re-orientation for best resiliency

(3) Distributed Intelligence: cephalopod nervous systems differ radically from the human: 3/5 of its neurons are in the 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? Beyond negotiation, beyond collaboration: toward shared intention.

2. What is a human-made creation that brings out the best in you? Why?

I love well written books. I love touching their pages, I love the sounds well-put together words make in my head, I love the images they weave, the empathy they build, the ideas they spark, the way I had to form my body in a particular position to prop the book up but still turn it's pages. A few that I've read recently and loved are 'Eastbound,' by Maylis de Kerangal, 'Mother Doll,' by Katya Apekina, 'In the Eye of the Wild' by Nastassja Martin, and Etal Adnan's 'In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country'

3. When do you cherish the slow or hard way of doing something? Why?

I cherish cooking. I don't use a food processor and cut my own vegetables. It's dangerous, and can get bloody, but one has to live on the edge. You get to really know the life forms you're about to eat.

This whole thing about getting faster and easier - we have to fill the space and time someway until we die. You're rushing -- so you have time to do what, exactly?

Maybe read more. And lay around in the sun.

4. What is something you appreciate or long for from the past? Why?

I love public bath houses and saunas. The original form of bathing. I love the cold plunge, the random conversations with naked neighbors, spending all day bathing, losing track of time and space, the tingly skin. I am happy though, that I live in the present and in a rich country that affords me to still have my own private shower at home.