Short Film Explores Digital Emergence

 Film  

The short digital film Emergencja from Aleksander Cieśla explores the possibilities of an uploaded or self-emergent consciousness.

Anew short film Emergencja from Aleksander Cieśla posted on Vimeo explores the possibilities of an uploaded or self-emergent consciousness. The vision, presented without words presents a journey through the cosmos, back into an array of neuron synapses and through the emergence of a digital self.

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Emergencja translates from Polish to Emergence, uses digital media inspired by natural phenomenon, like termite cathedrals to present an Alex-Grey like psychedelic vision.

Steven Johnson explores emergence in his book.  An individual ant, like an individual neuron, is just about as dumb as can be. Connect enough of them together properly, though, and you get spontaneous intelligence.

"The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can re-invent itself," writes Johnson.

Johnson explains what we know about this phenomenon in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Starting with the weird behavior of the semi-colonial organisms we call slime molds, Johnson details the development of increasingly complex and familiar behavior among simple components: cells, insects, and software developers all find their place in greater schemes.

Another interpretation of Emergence in the film could be that intelligence (artificial or uploaded), and super-intelligence are emergent properties of complex information systems.  Through Cieśla's maze of microprocessor-like synapses a self-aware being emerges, grows and extends itself through the universe — achieving a type of nirvana.





The film reminds us of Jason Silva: "A beautiful cathedral, a beautiful painting, a beautiful song---all of those are ecstatic visions held in stasis; in some sense the artist is saying "here is a glimpse I had of something ephemeral and fleeting and magical, and I'm doing my best to instantiate that into stone, into paint, into stasis."


SOURCE  Vimeo

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