Dr Stephanie Cussans Moran

PhD Transtechnology Research & 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training. Transtechnology Research | Plymouth University. Room 205, 10 Kirkby Place, Drake Circus, PL4 8AA.

Bio

Stephanie is a transdisciplinary researcher and artist, with over ten years’ experience of visual art practice alongside working with special collections in public, academic and specialist libraries and archives. Her practice as painter and librarian informed both her PhD method and her industry research with Etic Lab, where she led and contributed to cross-disciplinary digital and data analytics projects.

Stephanie completed her 3D3-funded PhD at Transtechnology Research in 2023. She holds a Postgraduate Diploma from Cyprus College of Art and an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London. She is Art Editor at The Ecological Citizen, a peer-reviewed ecological open access journal and was a Board Member of the Innovation Advisory Council for Wales (IACW) (2022-2024). X: @SJ_MoranUK / I: @mollusc_realism

Octopus Optics: a Cross-Disciplinary Investigation of Human Visual Bias in Narrative with Corresponding Writing Experiments using Animal Focalisation 

What is it like to see? If an octopus wrote a cultural anthropology of humans, how might visuality be reconceptualised?

Stephanie’s PhD thesis addresses the posthuman problem of visual bias in human narratives about other animals, by experimentally adopting the perspective of another highly visual animal – the octopus – through fiction. It takes a cross-disciplinary approach to analysing animal narratives from zoology, literature and art, drawing on ecological psychology and cognitive narratology.

Analysing fiction about other animals and zoological literature on octopus visual cognition from the outside perspective of a differently visual animal makes it possible to suggest that the empathic, mimetic western human optic is based in a visuality evolved for a predatory and acquisitive ground-dwelling lifestyle, through which it interprets and mediates nonhuman animals. By reconceptualising visuality from an ecological perspective, this thesis aims to disclose misrecognitions, representational blind spots and cultural misunderstandings in animal narratives.

It makes the argument that visual metaphors and focalisation used in representing other animals tend to represent ways they inhabit and move through human Umwelten, from a human perspective, thereby anthropocentrically and anthropomorphically reducing narrative affordances for expressing agency in relation to their own Umwelten.

Keywords: ecological psychology, cognitive narratology, natural history, molluscs, posthumanism, visuality, bias, octopus, literature, science fiction 

Publications, Conferences and Projects

‘Octopus Optics and Mussel Memories: communicating and contextualising mollusc conservation research through artistic projects outside the museum’, Euromal 2024, the 10th European Congress of Malacological Societies. Heraklion, Crete, Greece (forthcoming).

Parasitic Visuality: Computer Vision AI and Freshwater Mussels‘ . POM [Politics of Machines] Aachen 2024.

Hogan, A.; Moran S.C.; Hogan K., Barker B., Woodall R. 2024. Can websites reveal the extent and degree to which a business’s values reflect national policy? A text embeddings approach. In: 6th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2024). Valencia, 26-28 June 2024. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2024.2024.17801

Hogan et al. (2023). ‘Welsh Digital Maturity Survey 2023’. Commissioned by the Welsh Government

‘Pearl’, presentation and installation, at Digital Flow/s: 3D3 legacy symposium, the Watershed and Sparks, Bristol, September 2023.

AHRC-Smithsonian IPS Fellowship, ‘Using multimedia and AI to investigate nonhuman perspectives in ecosystem conservation and natural history collections’. Collections-based research with the freshwater mussel collection in the Invertebrate Zoology department at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, Jan-April 2022. Funded by the AHRC and sponsored by the US Government.

Pearl_a_Mussels_Perspective, an epic tale of species love, loss and extinction based on research carried out with Pfeiffer Lab at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, in collaboration with Dr John Pfeiffer and Dr Sean Keogh.

What can art do for ecological thinking?‘ The Ecological Citizen 5(2): 103–8. July 2022.

‘Alien Perspective, a Speculative Weightless Sketch’, Transtechnology Research Reader 2019-21. January 2022.

Rethinking Communication with Other Life Forms‘, The Marine Biologist Deep Dive, The Marine Biological Association UK, Plymouth. Youtube interview with Dr Kevin Hogan (Etic Lab) and Guy J. Baker, Editor The Marine Biologist magazine. November 2021.

‘Rethinking communication with other life forms’, The Marine Biologist magazine (Marine Biological Association UK),  July 2021. With Maggie Roberts.

Exploring the Pluriverse: Fictioning, Science and Interspecies Communication’, Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, July 2021. With Maggie Roberts.

‘Strange Relations: Exploring Interspecies Communication through AI and the Arts’, FIBER Festival, Netherlands. With Maggie Roberts. November 2021.

‘Crow Black’, catalogue essay, Darkness at Noon, curated by Ruth Calland at APT Gallery, London, November 2021.

‘Animal Consciousness’, SoundArt Radio, Totnes UK. With Sarah Scaife. August 2021

‘Communicating Between Two Alien Intelligences Through Art’, Art Machines 2, Hong Kong. With Maggie Roberts. July 2021.

‘Octopus Consciousness: a conversational provocation’, Posthuman Voice Symposium, University of Exeter, UK. With Sarah Scaife and Lucinda Guy. July 2021.

‘ISCRI – An AI coded by an Octopus’, SWW DTP Research Festival: Futures, South West and Wales. June 2021.

‘Scoping your Collaborative Digital Project’, SWW DTP Research Festival: Futures. With Etic Lab and George Simms. June 2021.

Eco-Sci-Fi Art and Interspecies Technology‘, Vector no. 292, Special issue on Speculative Art (Journal of the British Sci-fi Association), pp.8-11. Fall 2020.

Digital Technologies in the Access to Justice Sector: a Strategic Overview (Contributor), Etic Lab Press, April 2020.

‘Nonhuman diegetic worlds: the visual perception of animals as described in Richard H. Horne’s The Poor Artist, or Seven Eye-sights and One Object: Science in Fable (1850)’, Transtechnology Research Seminar, Plymouth, UK. March 2020.

‘Eco-Sci-Fi’, Stuart Hall Research Network, Iniva, London. With art collective Keiken. February 2020.

‘Eco-SF’, presentation and workshop on worldbuilding and ecological storytelling, SPUR virtual residency programme, Nottingham, UK. November 2020.

KRAKEN?: AI, Octopuses and Alien Intelligence, lecture for Goldsmiths Visual Cultures public programme, London UK. With Etic Lab and collective artist 0rphanDrift. October 2019.

‘Alien Holobiontology’, Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines, Bath Spa University, Bath UK. July 2019.

‘Visual Democratisation: AR and the Underpass Festival’, co-authored with Christian Tilt and Alexander Hogan. Proceedings of EVA London 2019.

‘Narrating Collective Empathy Online’, Transtechnology Research Reader 2019, pp.110-127.

‘Mantic Staining: the Divinatory Paintings of Ithell Colquhoun’, Re-writing the Future: 100 Years of Esoteric Modernism, Merano, Italy. With Anna Sebastian. May 2019.

‘Ecological Science Fictioning’, Environmental Arts Practice Research Conference, University of Plymouth, UK. April 2019.

‘Future Ghosts and Biosemiotic Chronotopes’, Haunted Geologies Symposium, University of Plymouth. March 2019.

‘Alien Physics’, Transtechnology Research seminar. February 2019.

‘Coding the Digital Occult’, Occulture Berlin. November 2018.

‘Through-ness: Structures for Feedback’, Interview with artist Annabelle Craven Jones in Alembic exhibition catalogue, pp.94-101, edited by Res. Gallery, Sarah Jury, Helen Kaplinsky & Lucy Sames. Res., London, June 2018.

Reviews:

Zootechnologies: A Media History of Swarm Research by Sebastian Vehlken‘. Leonardo Reviews online, May 2020.

Extraterrestrial Languages by Daniel Oberhaus‘. Leonardo Reviews online, March 2020.

High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis’. Leonardo Reviews, September 2019.

Blog posts and papers for Etic Lab include Anti-Muslim Propoganda in the US: a Study of Online Narratives and Communities, write-up of research by Kevin Hogan; Nascent: a New Contemporary Art Platform August 2019; The Guru Code: Algorithmic Reality Production and Cultural Work (with Alexander Hogan) May 2019; Building an Interspecies Twitter Bot (or, What Does a Cyborg Imagine it’s like to be a Bat?) September 2018.

Early PhD Project Work:

Interspecies Twitter bot, with Etic Lab  @alien_ontology

Skullcracker Suite Ballet, online hypertext sci-fi ballet with sonic drone score by sound engineer Chris Hind.