Seeing with Future Eyes
A Film Review of Cognition Factor
artwork courtesy of Headspace Studios
By Doctress Neutopia
December 2008
Cognition Factor is a film produced and narrated by South African futurist and filmmaker Mike Kawitzky a.k.a Schwann. The project searches for answers to age-old questions in a time of profound technological change. With his future eyes turned towards Earth, Schwann seeks expert advice from thinkers around the planet. As one of the utopian scholars who he questioned, it is interesting to see how similar the thought-patterns of the other thinkers in the film where to my own. It is as if we are living in a local village influenced by the same mentors and teachers. But, this is exactly what Schwann is pointing out in Cognition Factor.
It's a small world. When he is asleep in the southern hemisphere, I am awake in the northern hemisphere. Our futures are integrally connected to each other and to the precious life-support system of the global. We are becoming a world-wide network of neurons transmitting thought waves across the planet through our communication technologies. Schwann's film is an experiment in what this “global connected entity” is evolving into, and it is nothing like business or government as usual. This expanded consciousness of cyborgism (cybernetic organism) seems to be a necessary step in human evolution to get us out of the mess we are in.
I love the special effects backgrounds Schwann creates. They are a reminder of how important space is in our lives. His film is like Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night painting where the swirling night sky speaks to us in the background of an alive space. In one of Schwann's backgrounds, images of astronomical wonders from NASA are sucked down vortexes of white holes to recycle spacetime as speaker after speaker concurs that we are the universe becoming aware of itself. When the dialogue moves to what happens to us at death, the talking heads are solarized as if a veil or a fog has moved the speaker into a parallel dimension of the talking dead. Beyond the grave, Schwann then moves us into the garden of butterflies and dragonflies as the talking heads speak to us in bubbles rising from the swamp of life.
Humanity is searching for a solution to the morass we are living in and Schwann's film moves us a step closer to manifesting a planetary thought grid that allows us to make a quantum leap of understanding who we are and how we can survive with each other in a reflective peace.
Schwann states that the Internet was his rebirth. It was my rebirth as well. We met online before the time of the World Wide Web. At that time, cyberspace consisted of text based newsgroups called Usenet. We participated in a myth-making process of a group of Internet writers who were drawn to the idea of Gaia Messiah and shamanism saving the planet through collective consciousness. Gaia Messiah is based on the Gaia scientific theory that the Earth is a superorganism that manages such things as the global climate. Gaia is responsible for our human evolution, and now, as we head towards colonizing Outer Space, it is on the verge of reproduction. Gaia Messiah takes the scientific theory one step further to recognize its power to save itself through cognition.
1.jpg)
Even though it may not be fully aware of itself, Gaia Messiah consciousness is expanding exponentially. Gaia Messiah has the potential to rescue us from massive social and economic collapse by realizing now that our planetary organism is awakening. Bringing visionary artistic and scientific voices together in the Cognition Factor is an act of the myth-making process of Gaia Messiah. Some of the backgrounds in Cognition Factor show ecocity landscapes of solar–powered pyramids that could be a glimpse of our collective future. That is, if we can listen to the wisdom of each other and know we are tied together with an invisible evolutionary love knot. Cybershaman, our time has come. See you on the dark side of the moon!