WORLD BRAIN STÉPHANE DEGOUTIN & GWENOLA WAGON

World Brain describes the planetary network that surrounds us and provides theoretical tools to understand it. The interactive website is an online resource centre for finding one’s way around the world brain: it is a documentary, a work of fiction and a how-to handbook.

The online version of the film is non-linear and divided into sequences in a map-like presentation. It is a transmedia essay in which its directors, Gwenola Wagon and Stéphane Degoutin « manufacture a new reality », one in which a community of scientists set off into the forest to reflect on collective intelligence, whilst documenting the fantasy of a world brain embodied today by the Internet. It deals with the architecture of data centres, of the collective intelligence of kittens, high-frequency trading, how to survive in the forest in the Wikipedia era and tinkering with transhuman rats…

World Brain provides an opportunity to discover from the inside the physical places through which the Internet network passes. It is filmed from the viewpoint of the data: the spectator sees the world as if he/she were a piece of information, crossing the planet almost instantaneously, being infinitely copied or, on the contrary, stocked in places kept secret. Above and beyond the exploration, the film proposes an investigation into the utopias and ideologies in relation with the emergence of a form of collective intelligence and the hypothesis of a world brain.

Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon’s projects deal with such ideas as alternative, post-internet lifestyles (Sharing Life, Laboratoire de schizophrénie contrôlée), work and its mutation into powder (Stockorama, Cyborgs dans la brume), places in relation with Internet (Globodrome, Le Terrier, World Brain, La Société nuage 1 et 2), images of war that disappear amongst a ballet of video clips and onboard cameras (Dance Party in Iraq, War) and different possible futures for towns (Voyages immobiles, Architecture potentielle, Moilesulaz échelle 1, Musée du terrorisme).
Stéphane Degoutin is an artist, writer and researcher. He was born in Toronto (Canada) and now lives and works in Paris, where he also teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. Gwenola Wagon is an artist and a lecturer at Paris 8 University’s visual arts department.