Interview with Stéphane Degoutin & Gwenola Wagon about their transmedia project World Brain
Dream of Reason …
In their latest transmedia project French artists and researchers Stéphane Degoutin & Gwenola Wagon present a large collection of texts, images, and films related to the idea of a World Brain. The project, published on ARTE creative, is 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 Brain is made out mostly of found materials: videos downloaded on YouTube, images, scientific or pseudo scientific reports, news feeds…
Jitter .Magazine: World Brain had its world premiere at this year’s transmediale festival Berlin, which focused on the theme ‘capture all’. For your own project you captured most of the content from the internet. How is the idea of ‘capture all’ reflected in your work?
Stéphane Degoutin / Gwenola Wagon: What happens when the planet captures itself? Our projects question this endless repository of digital resources. Globodrome tells the story of a world tour captured through the representations of the planet that are geolocalised on Google Earth, by following the same route as Jules Verne in Around the World in Eighty Days. In Cyborgs in the Mist, we completed an on-site enquiry in Saint-Denis (a northern suburb of Paris) by footage found on the Internet, which would not have been possible to film (data centers, evangelist churches filmed by their own adepts in trance, meat and bone meal factory…). War and Dance Party in Iraq show “backstage” scenes from a war: soldiers dancing on the battlefield. All our projects question what happens to a world which looks more and more like cyberspace, like the virtual worlds which had previously been described in SciFi novels. How can we relate our explorations of these worlds?
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