Hippies from hell (Ine Poppe, 2002) 19:26-23:25
Hippies from Hell are a group of hackers, techies, artists, writers and puzzlers. In the eighties they published hacker magazine Hacktic and in 1993 they started the first Dutch Internet-provider, xs4all, thus opening the Internet for the general public. Apart from this they throw wild parties and organize open-air hacker festivals, using the Internet as their social platform. On their mailing list they discuss almost every aspect of our technology infested society. The Dutch hackers, as the hippies were called initially, are a special group within the international hacker movement, which they helped create for a large part.
In the film artists play with hardware, young hippies hack their school-calculators, lock pickers open locks without a key: hacking is not just fooling around with technology, it is an attitude, an activity, a verb.
North By North West (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)
Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained (Martha Rosler, 1977) 18:03-40:06
This chilling tape, “operatically” conceived, but neither a musical nor a documentary, probes the objectification of women and others in a technological/bureaucratic society. At its core is a long, continuous shot that reveals the part-by-part measurement and evaluation of a woman by a white-coated male examiner and a chorus of three women assistants. How do we come to see ourselves as objects? How do fragmentation and comparison assist in social control? This ordeal of scrutiny thinly alludes to a monumentally protracted episode of Truth or Consequences. The final sequence presents re-framed government photos of women being measured, accompanied by a voiceover litany of “crimes against women.” Rosler’s distanced depiction of the systematic, institutionalized “science” of measurement and classification is meant to recall the oppressive tactics of the armed forces or concentration camps, and to underscore the internalization of standards that determine the meaning of women’s being.
Faceless (Manu Luksch, 2007) Trailer
In a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future, everybody is faceless. A woman panics when she wakes up one day with a face. With the help of the Spectral Children she slowly finds out more about the lost power and history of the human face and begins the search for its future. FACELESS was produced under the rules of the ‘Manifesto for CCTV Filmmakers’. The manifesto states, amongst other things, that additional cameras are not permitted at filming locations, as the omnipresent existing video surveillance (CCTV) is already in operation. “RealTime orients the life of every citizen. Eating, resting, going to work, getting married – every act is tied to RealTime. And every act leaves a trace of data – a footprint in the snow of noise…”
My Fair Lady
I Love Alaska (Lernert Engelberts + Sander Plug, 2009) Episode 1 and 2
August 4, 2006, the personal search queries of 650,000 AOL (America Online) users accidentally ended up on the Internet, for all to see. These search queries were entered in AOL’s search engine over a three-month period. After three days AOL realized their blunder and removed the data from their site, but the sensitive private data had already leaked to several other sites. I love Alaska tells the story of one of those AOL users. We get to know a religious middle-aged woman from Houston, Texas, who spends her days at home behind her TV and computer. Her unique style of phrasing combined with her putting her ideas, convictions and obsessions into AOL’s search engine, turn her personal story into a disconcerting novel of sorts.
