Whole Earth Codec

A film by Connor Cook, Christina Lu and Dalena Tran at Antikythera

Techniques: Composition, Sound Design

The Whole Earth Codec is an autoregressive, multi-modal foundation model that allows the planet to observe itself. This proposal radically expands the scope of foundation models, moving beyond anthropocentric language data towards the wealth of ecological information immanent to the planet. Moving from raw sense data to high-dimensional embedding in latent space, the observatory folds in on itself, thus revealing a form of computational reason that transcends sense perception alone: a sight beyond sight. Guided by planetary-scale sensing rather than myopic anthropocentrism, the Whole Earth Codec opens up a future of ambivalent possibility through cross-modal meta-observation, perhaps generating a form of planetary sapience.

https://codec.earth