Cyborgs in the Mist

"To talk about post-human utopia, Degoutin and Wagon film Saint-Denis on a gray day. There, in an old, derelict industrial street, a laboratory fights against man's programmed obsolescence.", Georgia Makaline, Demain aujourd'hui hier (Tomorrow Today Yesterday)

The film Cyborgs in the Mist follows a group of researchers of the LOPH laboratory, who fight against mankind's programmed obsolescence. It takes place in a district of Saint-Denis which concentrates different utopias aimed at transforming the world, and draws a portrait of modern society as a process of atomization. There lies the Villa Coignet, an abandoned monument to the technique of reinforced concrete, the Saria meat and bone meal factory, one of the largest data centres in France, as well as delivery warehouses and evangelical churches.

In 1851, François Coignet sets up a factory in Saint-Denis. He develops a new kind of mortar that becomes as hard as stone agglomerated concrete. To demonstrate its possibilities, he had a villa built entirely in this material : the first house in the world to be built entirely in concrete, as if in a single block – a monument to the modern world in general, and to the northern suburbs in particular.

Perhaps is it precisely because of its symbolic importance – symbolic of a history we do not want to see – that the villa is left in a state of advanced decay. The plaster is peeling off, revealing the raw material of this monument to the universal powder. It is in this place that one hardly notices that the research of the LOPH laboratory will take place.

Acknowledging the inevitable development of robotics and artificial forms of intelligence, the LOPH laboratory experiments with ways of adapting mankind to be able to fight against its planned obsolescence ("Lutte contre l'obsolescence programmée de l'homme" in French). Its aim is to experiment with survival scenarios for when the period of human domination of the planet comes to an end. How can we anticipate this reversal in the evolutionary logic of the species ? How can we adapt to this new environment without too much violence ?

It is essential to anticipate catastrophic scenarios. Teams of academics are involved, as well as science fiction writers and fledgling forms of artificial intelligence.