Deep Soup

Digital technology is increasingly steering us towards a world of the mind, a frictionless existence that has become detached from our physical experience. With this film, post-humanist artists Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters attempt to turn the tide. They seek a way to lead people back from their screens to a bodily and material experience. The duo invited people online to contribute their own videos on a variety of themes. Not of people, but only of matter and movement—breaking, rolling, sinking, floating, falling. All these clips go into the soup—a green physical intelligence that is trained on the collected images. In Deep Soup, we see this non-human intelligence in its weightless world, processing this slurry of information. The result is a challenge to view physical reality with fresh eyes. A celebration of the forces that belong to our material world, which digital AI models and algorithms try to smooth out.