Jul 23, 2022

Squid Squad Coro

Squid Squad & The Deep Sea Oddity Explorer 🦑

A Squiddy cluster of deep sea themed interactive cabinets! Made for the Coro’s 2022 Incredible Journeys Exhibition.

Lots of squid with the face of the same man!

Come join the Cephalopod uprising!

An art-encrusted island of curious cabinets (an arty-pelago if you like!😉) commissioned for the Coro’s 2022 Incredible Journeys Exhibition (August 5th-26th).

Step up and gaze into the inky void to have your face ‘borrowed’ by the migrating Squid Squad. Move around the cabinets to explore the Kaleidoscopic Experimentation Module using our specimen petri dishes or try making your own. Further round you’ll discover a Broiling Cave of luminescent deep sea oddities hidden in the cluster. Beyond this, a rare tank of “Slow Water” will warp your reflection in mind-bending ways. Don’t miss the tiny and shy Ether Fish below, floating in a dome of trapped time!

A man and woman standing outside a building with giant inflatable tentacles

Chris and Jennie at the Exhibition Launch Event

Crouching Woman and young girl looking at a screen showing a kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope experiments ahoy!

Two boys pointing at screen

Two folks trying to figure out what’s going on in the Slow Water tank

Come join the Cephalopod uprising! Arty panel

Black screen with white wooden surround. Showing squid with a human face.

Squid Squad assemble!

Vertical screen showing a repeated pattern in cabinet with a light and circle slot underneath

Experiment with Petri dishes or your own drawings using the experiment cards under the Kaleidoscopic Experimentation Module.

bubbles, fish and jellyfish glowing blue in tube

The Luminescent cave of deep sea oddities!

Two people with their reflected bodies twisted around each other in a screen

Watch your reflection warp and wibble in the Slow Water tank

cabinet showing screen, lit underneath with various holes and images attached to the sides.

Walking round the ‘Arty-pelago’ you see various Ernst Haeckel prints we transferred to wooden boards and a few arty experiments.

A floating goldfish behind a sign saying Ether Fish. But mostly showing a man reflected!

The Ether fish is so shy it can’t even be photographed easily

4 sheets of paper on a wall each showing a grid of art pictures

Squid Squad A.I. Generated Art 🦑🤖🎨

TV sitting sideways (ie tall and narrow) on a corner cabinet

The underlying structure of the Squid Squad cabinet is made from a second hand TV and cabinet.

Inspiration

With the Squid Squad I was aiming for the same gloriously hand-made asthetic of Georges Méliès and The Mighty Boosh!

Man's head with an octopus body

The Mighty Boosh - Harrison

Moon with man's face surrounded by clouds

“I am the Moon” - The Mighty Boosh

Man's face in the moon

Georges Méliès - Moon

Actors - 2 mermaids on each side and a sailor in the middle with a giant octopus and fish all around

Georges Méliès - 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA 1907

Actors on stage

Georges Méliès - Évocation spirite (1899; Summoning the Spirits)

Squid Squad A.I. Generated Art 🦑🤖🎨

While making the Squid Squad Atoll we were granted access to a shiny new Artificial Intelligence image generator called DALL·E. It is being developed by OpenAI to create original, realistic images and art from a short text description. It “learned” to create art after analysing 800 million images.

Find out more and join the waiting list to have a go yourself here: https://labs.openai.com/

All the images below were generated with DALL·E using prompts like:

“An Renaissance oil painting of a squid taking a selfie”
“A dark painting of squid with human faces in the style of Georges Méliès”

16 images of squid

DALL·E generated images 1

20 images of squid in different art styles

DALL·E generated images 2

20 images of squid in different art styles

DALL·E generated images 3

20 images of squid in different art styles

DALL·E generated images 4