D'ALEMBERT'S DREAM

Artistic Director
Phoebe von Held

Based on
Denis Diderot's D'Alembert's Dream

Translation
Caroline Warman and Phoebe von Held

Adaptation
Phoebe von Held

Animation
Juan Fontanive

Camera
Justin Badger, Rami Dvir

Editing
Farrah Drabu

Cast
Candida Benson: Mlle de Lespinasse; Scientists from the National Institute of Medical Research, London

Science/Art Coordinator
Simon Gould

Venue
'State of Mind' Exhibition, LSE, London, curated by Simon Gould and Ruth McLennan, 2005 

Supported by
The Wellcome Trust

As D'Alembert, one of the most important mathematicians of the eighteenth-century, falls asleep, he is haunted by disturbing nightmares. His good friend, the Salonniere Mlle de Lespinasse finds him talking in his sleep and decides to note down D'Alembert's bizarre ideas. The mathematician's surreal hallucinations reveal the vision of a universe created by matter alone, without any intervention of god. In this cosmos, the line between inanimate and live matter is blurred. Soul and self are as material as stone. Everything is in movement and flux. Species continually evolve into new shapes. Identities between human and animal, female and male, one species and another are fluid. Synthesising the new scientific insights of his day in the fictional form of a dream, Diderot's discourse on materialist philosophy is as  much prophetic vision of today's scientific knowledge as it is nightmare, foreshadowing  the ethical dilemmas bound up with biotechnological progress.

The adaptation concept relates passages from Diderot's original dialogue to responses from scientists working in the biomedical sciences. Whilst Diderot's eigtheenth-century 'science fiction' looks forward into the future through speculative ingenuity, today's scientists look back at their own history recognising that what once seemed fiction has now found reality in their work. Elaborating the fictional from the real, the film fuses different animation techniques with science documentary formats.