Following the route of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout in Jules Verne’s Around The World in Eighty days, crossing every meridian from east to west on a virtual globe, Globodrome explores our representations of planet Earth. With the help of Google Earth and videos found on the Internet, this 80-minute film is part frenzied adventure, part passionate commentary on the virtual world and the triumph of positivism. Like jules verne, the filmmaker is an armchair traveller. But while verne was celebrating the march of progress at the height of the industrial revolution, Gwenola Wagon, in keeping with her time, questions the presumed benefit of having countless layers of information slowly bury our planet, a planet we have shrunk to fit on a computer screen and manipulate with our fingertips. Reality now hides under or perhaps beyond this continually mounting flow, a kind of uncontrollable invasion that intensifies our malaise in the face of the idea that our world is nothing more than a gigantic amuse- ment park. Walt Disney can rest easy: his kind are clearly in the driver’s seat. — Philippe Gajan

The itinerary follows the latitudes from East to West and crosses all the meridians of the globe, from London to the Mont-Cenis, from Brindisi to the Red Sea, fromthe Suez Canal to a series of artificial paradises, from the detroit of Bab-el-Mandeb to a saudi princess, from the disappeared spaces of Aden to Socotra, from Mumbai and Benares to Kolkota and the detroit of Malacca in Singapore and its Komodo dragon, from the sea of China to Kong Kong, from the bay of Taiwan to Yokohama, from the 180th meridian to San Francisco, from Sacramento to Reno, from the Mustang Ranch toInterstate 80, from Salt Lake City to Des Moines, from Chicagoland to New York, and from Dublin to London.

This event takes place in the context of the cycle Virtually Sublime : a series of films, talks and performances on a serious, playful and up-to-the-minute possibility: the vertiginous absence of borders between reality and virtuality.