This June, 14 artists will gather around the campfire under the revolving orange beam of the Point Lowly Lighthouse, before descending into the Southern Ocean to witness the kaleidoscopic underwater performance that is the mating ritual of the Sepia Apama, the Australian Giant Cuttlefish.

Transported out of our normal terrestrial habitat to an unfamiliar arena, we are cast in the role of cephalopod audience, subject to a constantly-morphing dance of colour, light, texture and pattern. With their disproportionately-large brains, masterful mutability and complex social interactions, the cuttlefish harbour untold secrets. Surrounded by multitudes of bioluminescent shapeshifters, we will need to learn new habits of body and mind to attune ourselves to a complex set of transmissions from a non-human intelligence.

Meeting the cuttlefish in their world, we will be immersed in new languages of mass, bodies, and particles; of clouds, beams and dots. It is here - against the backdrop of millions of crackling krill, as we place ourselves in the context of the universe - that the awareness of scale can start to press on perception.

On re-emerging, artists will incubate ideas about cuttlefish life - a precarious solo existence, lived in a state of ever-changing camouflage, but punctuated with moments of ecstatic mass assembly.

How can we be changed by being in their presence? What can we learn about reading other minds (even if they might be considered alien)? About our body as a membrane for camouflage, warning and display? About shapeshifting as a political practice?

Part-human, part-mollusc, our 2019 artist camp will be an experiment in interspecies observation, bio-psychedelia and collaborative co-existence.

See our "probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien" reading list and Pattern Flashers Reading Group to get involved.