At Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, the Helsinki-based artist Tuomas A. Laitinen has filled the cavernous Main Hall with an intelligence that has no central brain, no fixed shape and no interest in being legible to humans: the octopus. His exhibition "Siphon" begins with copper, a material whose mythologies and geopolitics the artist has traced for a decade — and the trail led, improbably, to the octopus, whose blood carries oxygen on a copper base.

Wall-scale projections of abstracted octopus skin flood the room in thermal magentas and molten ambers, built from Laitinen's own footage combined with recordings of sleeping octopuses made at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Overhead, a 2026 sound work, "8Eternal", sends the voice of the Kenyan composer Nyokabi Kariuki through eight ultrasonic speakers, in narrow beams of sound that surface and vanish as visitors move through the space.

The show treats the octopus as a model of a different kind of mind — distributed, shape-shifting and opaque to human categories — and sets it against the present moment, when artificial intelligence dominates discussion of non-human intelligence. Laitinen's copper thread runs through the installation as both material and metaphor, linking deep-sea biology to the mining, trade and technology that move the metal around the world.

The installation is on view in Pioneer Works' Main Hall, where the scale of the room lets the projections and the overhead sound work operate at full stretch. Visitors move through beams of sound and fields of colour that shift as they walk, encountering an animal whose way of being in the world remains, for all the footage and science, fundamentally strange.