Stéphane Degoutin, Gwenola Wagon: World Brain
Globale: Infosphäre
Globale: Infosphäre
- Duration
- 14:58
- Category
- Interview
- Date
- 04.09.2015 to 31.01.2016
- Description
- Interview with Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon in the context of the exhibition »Infosphäre«
»World Brain« is an online project and non-linear essay film that takes the viewer along on a journey through Internet folklore and the current architecture of the infosphere. The documentary aspect of the film is based on found footage. YouTube videos, interviews, and scientific and pseudoscientific reports lay bare the physical and virtual infrastructure of the Internet: the data centers, satellites, undersea cables, logistics, knowledge sharing, and principles of highfrequency trade that provide the foundation for cognitive capitalism. The film’s narrative strand, meanwhile, explores utopias that have been foretelling the collective intellect for centuries: animal magnetism and galvanism, the ether, the interlinking of nature, the noosphere, and human interconnection through a shared network. Some of these theories are rather esoteric, and some of them were part of 1960s counterculture and early cybernetic society. The Internet can be interpreted as the first realization of this kind of nerve system or network.
A group of scientists that uses Wikipedia and The Whole Earth Catalog to seek to survive in the woods thus combines unexpectedly with internet kittens, telepathic rats, a shark gnawing on undersea cables, DIY devices, and much more to form a fabric that gives rise to the »World Brain«.
Daria Mille
Video Documentary:
ZKM | Institute for Visual Media
Camera: Sarah Binder, Martina Rotzal, Christina Zartmann
Editing: Martina Rotzal
Interview: Regina Hock
