Not Quite Human: Science and Utopia

While preparing for this contribution I went to see a film: Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. In 100 minutes a dense collage of visual poetry is presented to the spectator, accompanied by an equally dense essay of impressions collected in Japan and Africa. Japan has been chosen as one possible society of the future, representing what the film pictured to be one extreme in the art of survival of a civilization yet to come. What fascinated me was the Utopian touch that was carefully and yet emphatically, read out of the present: the music of video-games, for instance, as the constant, underlying musical theme of a buzzing metropolis; a description of how these games were programmed and how a new collective language of imageries was in the making, coding memories and thus providing the essence of a future collective unconscious. Interspersed with everyday scenes, celebrating their banality and uniqueness at the same time, the film cautiously proceeded to construct an imagery of a future, in which humankind continues to evolve, guided by the computer and computational thinking. The emphasis was put on the collective mind, and not the individual, in the making, and how this new form of technology-based consciousness would interact, shape and be shaped by what the film-maker sought to single out. Japanese society was predisposed, in his view, to serve as a model for survival, because it knew how to balance high technology with the mechanism essential for survival-social ritual.