Degenerative Knowledge Production
Video, 76 min, 2024
“It is possible that the thing we call ‘a brain’ evolved many times independently. Or it could be that a lot of our ancestors had brains but lost them, which suggests the costs of building brains sometimes outweigh the benefits.”
Degenerative Knowledge Production is a speculative documentary in four chapters exploring how human intelligence and stupidity have been controlled and defined by electricity as both a physical and metaphysical force throughout history. Through examples of self-experimentation, exploitation, and linguistic patterns, the documentary reveals how the ”cogiocratic system” shapes human cognition by influencing our electrical impulses and thought pathways. The film is primarily composed of found materials from social media and was co-written with the philosopher Thomas Moynihan.
Excerpt from the documentary:
“The earliest mention of the human brain comes to us from injury, an ancient Egyptian surgeon writes:
If thou examine a man having a gaping wound in his head, penetrating to the bone, smashing his skull, and rending open his skull to the membrane enveloping his brain, thou should not palpate his wound. This is an ailment not to be treated.. until thou know that he has reached a decisive point.
We know our brain through unthinkable trauma like this. We understand our own organ by destroying someone else’s. We murder to dissect, but we also learn. In this violent codependency, it is the doctor’s job to decrypt what’s living by tearing it tissue by tissue, limb from limb, head to toe. Here we find Alcmaeon of Croton, in 500 BCE, claiming the brain as the “seat of perception and intelligence”. He did so after scooping out a thick pudding from a human skull onto a stone table and, to his shock, finding it still connected to the eyes via two bloody strings.
The history of neurology goes something like this: A crowbar driven through a frontal lobe, teaching us about functional localisation; an erratic surgeon sucking the hippocampi out of an epileptic man with a metal straw, stumbling on where memories are stored. Discovery triggered by loss. First there was intact intelligence; after, the “stupid”, violent mistake to learn from.”