World Brain

The world we live in often resembles a Borgesian story. Indeed, if one wanted to write a sequel to Borges’ Fictions, he could do it simply by putting together press articles.

World Brain is an assemblage made out mostly of found materials : videos downloaded on Youtube or extracted from information feeds and actual experiments, images, scientific or pseudo scientific reports, news feeds… The project can be viewed in a linear or fragmented way, episode after episode.

The utopia of an universal connection leads humanity into a pharaonic project : the construction of a world space specifically designed for the comfort of data, made of hundreds of thousands of data centers interconnected by submarine or underground cables. World Brain takes the viewer into this Promethean machine. Many believe that a global brain will emerge of it, which we would only be the neurons.

World Brain takes the viewer through a journey inside the physical places by which the Internet transits: submarine cables, data centers, satellites. The film adopts the point of view of the data. The audience view the world as if they were information, crossing the planet in an instant, copied in an infinite number of instances or, at the contrary, stored in secret places.

The project describes the planetary network surrounding us and offers theoretical tools to interpret it. It considers the perverse effects of the universal connection, and the risk for the individuals to become numb, under the reign of collective intelligence. The film also shows the peregrinations of a network of nomadic researchers who meet far from traditional research networks in the different forests of the world. They imagine prototype scenarios of experimental lifestyles, taking into account the interconnectedness of human beings. Their goal is to build an alternative project for the survival of mankind.

World Brain offers a short story of the idea of the communication between brains. The idea emerges long before the Internet : galvanism, animal magnetism, mesmerism, universal fluid, ether, fifth element, spirit telegraph… It starts to become real with Chappe's semaphor, Morse's telegraph, the telephone, cybernetics and the invention of the Internet.

The idea of a global brain used to be an intellectual speculation. It has suddenly become an everyday reality. All human beings, interconnected from the inside, form a superorganism. Mankind builds a global brain, synapse after synapse. Many writers have imagined a collective consciousness that would emerge from the universal connection of minds. They usually see the human race being unified, in a holistic and often mystical perspective, sometimes linked to the concept of biosphere or to the Gaia hypothesis. The utopia becomes real. The limits of the individuals begin to blur. Data travel through the whole planet. They run through a network of fiber optic cables, whether subterranean or submarine. They are stored in a network of data centers.

The installation makes it possible to walk through the books that were used to build the project, and surrounded by the chapters of the film.