Film Programme: HEXEN 2.0

On the occasion of the exhibition Suzanne Treister: Hexen 2.0, HMKV cooperates with the RWE Forum | U Cinema. We will be showing four films from May 3rd, 2012. These four films illustrate in various ways the topics which are developed by Suzanne Treister in her body of work, describing the origin, reception, chances and risks of networked digital information technologies.

eXistenZ
by David Cronenberg, USA, 1999, 97 min.
Thursday, 3rd May 2012, 20:00
Friday, 4th May 2012, 20:00

Allegra Geller, the leading game designer in the world, is testing her new virtual reality game, eXistenZwith a focus group. As they begin, she is attacked by a fanatic assassin employing a bizarre organic gun. She flees with a young marketing trainee, Ted Pikul, who is suddenly assigned as her bodyguard. Unfortunately, her pod, an organic gaming device that contains the only copy of the eXistenZgame program, is damaged. To inspect it, she talks Ted into accepting a gameport in his own body so he can play the game with her. The events leading up to this, and the resulting game lead the pair on a strange adventure where reality and their actions are impossible to determine from either their own or the game's perspective. Written by Kenneth Chisholm (Source: Internet Movie Data Base)

Pi
by Darren Aronofsky, USA, 1998, 84 min.
Thursday, 24th  Mai 2012, 20:00
Sunday, 27th  Mai 2012, 15:00

The mathematician Maximillian Cohen is tormented by a severe migraine since he was a kid, and he uses many pills to reduce his painful headaches. He is a lonely man, and his only friend is his former professor Sol Robeson. Max has the following assumptions, which rules his life: (1) Mathematics is the language of nature; (2) Everything around us can be represented and understood from numbers; (3) If you graph the numbers in any system, patterns emerge. Therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature. Based on these principles, Max is trying to figure out a system to predict the behavior of the stock market. Due to his research, Max is chased by a Wall Street company with obvious interest in the results of his studies, and by a Chasidic Torah scholar, who believes that this long string of numbers is a code sent from God. Written by Claudio Carvalho (Source: Internet Movie Data Base)

Alphaville
by Jean-Luc Godard, FR, 1965, 105 min.
Thursday, 14th June 2012, 20:00
Friday, 15th June 2012, 20:00

Lemmy Caution, an American private-eye, arrives in Alphaville, a futuristic city on another planet. His very American character is at odds with the city's ruler, an evil scientist named Von Braun, who has outlawed love and self-expression. Written by Gene Volovich (Source: Internet Movie Data Base)

A Journey into the Mind of P.
by Fosco & Donatello Dubini, DE/SUI, 2001, 90 min.
Thursday, 21st Juni 2012, 20:00
Sunday, 24th Juni 2012, 15:00

Thomas Pynchon is a best - selling American author, who, very much unlike the vast majority his peers, has eschewed the lime light with almost fanatical determination for the past four decades. This very well made movie pieces together testimonies and evidence and investigates Pynchon's background and (speculative) motivations, not just for his persistent hiding, but especially for his writing. It left me with a lot of admiration for the person Thomas Pynchon, who is happy to have his books read and get on with his life, rather than cheapen himself on the media circuit. The sound track is aptly provided by "The Residents", an American underground band who for the past 30 years have only appeared masked on stage and whose members are unknown. Seems that Pynchon is in good company. (Source: Internet Movie Database)

Das Netz
by Lutz Dammbeck, DE, 2003, 115 min.
Saturday, 7th July 2012, 18:00 Uhr

Where does technology lead us? Ted Kaczynski, the ex-Mathematician who lived a secluded life in the woods until he was arrested and convicted as the "Unabomber", believes that it will be our doom.
Lutz Dammbeck confronts us with a puzzle, looking for connections between technological positivism, mind control experiments and the hippie movement, all traced back to state power interests developing as results of World War II. However, the links are weak, and instead of presenting us with a final conclusion resulting from his research (as other documentarists would eagerly do), Dammbeck simply leaves us to solve the puzzle by ourselves, strengthen or break the links as we find appropriate, raising interesting questions on science, technology and human's role in society along the way. (Source: Internet Movie Database)

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www.herakleskonzept.de