Emergence is a phenomenon through which something new appears — something that cannot be fully explained by the sum of its parts.

This puzzle lies at the heart of complexity studies and systems theory. In these fields, relationships, patterns, and interactions matter as much as molecules or genes. They examine how systems — from ecosystems to economies, and from brains to societies — shape the behaviour of their components. This perspective stands in tension with the mechanical and reductionist framework of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, which explains phenomena by breaking them into ever‑smaller parts, largely ignoring the larger system from which those parts were extracted.

In both the sciences and the social sciences, the systemic worldview has already taken root. It now coexists with the Cartesian paradigm, the two approaches pulling in opposite directions. The phenomenon of emergence suggests — in contrast with mechanical reductionism — that the whole influences its parts, that causality can flow downward. Emergence thus offers a gateway into exploring this tension between two orders of truth and two ways of understanding reality.

EMERGENCE is a feature‑length documentary that investigates the foundations of this paradigm shift and explores its consequences. At the crossroads of science, philosophy, art, and music, the film offers an immersion into the emergent logics that shape life, consciousness, societies, and artificial intelligences, while questioning the implications of these conceptual advances.

Guided by an artistic approach attentive to abstract forms, small details, and collective dynamics, and sustained by profound intellectual encounters, EMERGENCE invites us to rethink our relationship to science, to ourselves, and to the world.

EMERGENCE

A flock of birds, for instance, moves with a coherence that no individual bird possesses on its own. Its centre of mass often predicts the flock’s trajectory better than the behaviour of any single bird. So, is a flock merely an aggregation of birds following simple local rules? Or does the flock itself guide the birds that compose it?