“World Brain” by Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon (2015)
World Brain proposes a stroll through motley folkloric tales : data centers, animal magnetism, the Internet as a myth, the inner lives of rats, how to gather a network of researchers in the forest, how to survive in the wild using Wikipedia, how to connect cats and stones…
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.
The World Brain is made out mostly of found materials : videos downloaded on Youtube, images, scientific or pseudo scientific reports, news feeds… [...] 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.
More projects by S. Degoutin and G. Wagon on their Nogovoyage website.
February 24, 2015
I take the opportunity to add this “statement” that can be heard throughout the teaser. It undoubtedly connects with the title of our project “(…) Inhabiting the Cloud(s)”: “This is where we live. These server farms store our Facebook friends, the articles we read, our Google search history, our pictures, our videos, our emails, our blogs, our social and economic activity. Every part of our online lives, that is our lives, full stop. The dust of human beings. Fragments. Powder. This is where our vital information is calculated, where we make purchases, where we come to meet other humans. We leave tracks that combine with other tracks. There are transmitted, copied, repeated, combined, and recombined, either by algorithms, or by humans. We have become Internet.”