Stéphane Degoutin et Gwenola Wagon, 2012
Extraits du film Cyborgs dans la brume, enquête sur les data centers, le béton armé, le Mechanical Turk et Wikipédia.
The film presents the LOPH research lab and its utopian proposals to struggle against the planned obsolescence of mankind. The lab is located in the villa Coignet, rue Charles Michel, Saint-Denis, the first house in the world entirely made out of concrete. The LOPH research lab will take place in Saint-Denis, 72 Charles Michels Street, around the site of the Coignet villa. It aims at experimenting scenarios for the survival of mankind, for when the domination of man upon the planet will end.In 1851, François Coignet builds a factory in Charles Michels Street, on a hill where a flour mill used to stand.He produces gelatin and glu. Gelatin is a universal, synthetic type of food, made of bones, powders, food residues, skin and the cartilages of dead animals. He improves the chemical processes and discovers a mortar as strong as stone, which he calls "agglomerated concrete". To demonstrate its possibilities, he has a villa built entirely in this material, forming a single molded block. The metal beams that support the floors are coated with concrete, which makes it the first house in the world ever built in reinforced concrete, and therefore a monument for the modern world in general, and for the northern suburbs of Paris in particular.Maybe it is precisely for its symbolic importance – symbolic of a history one does not want to see – that the villa is left in an advanced state of decomposition.The plasters come off, leaving the raw material on view, of this monument to the universal powder. It is in this place that goes almost unnoticed, that researchers will fight the planned obsolescence of mankind. Taking into account the inevitable development of robotics and artificial forms of intelligence, the LOPH research lab experiments ways to adapt mankind to its new environment, and put it in a position to fight against its planned obsolescence. How can we anticipate this shift in the logic of evolution? How can we adapt to this change with a minimum of violence? Academic teams, science-fiction writers, and very new forms of artificial intelligence work together to anticipate the most disastrous scenarios.