Sunday 31 March Welt am Draht / World on a Wire (Part II)

Welt am Draht / World on a Wire (Part II)

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, (1973)

Thanks to overwhelming popular request, we'll be screening part II of Fassbinder's science fiction, World on a Wire this March.

WE'LL BE SCREENING AT the same LOCATION WATCH THE MAILING LIST FOR DETAILS

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s visionary science-fiction thriller originally made for German television in 1973. 

[World on a Wire is] a very beautiful story that depicts a world where one is able to make projections of people using a computer. And, of course, this leads to the uncertainty of whether someone himself is a projection, since in the virtual world projections resemble reality. Perhaps another, larger world has made us as a virtual one? In this sense it deals with the old philosophical model, which here takes on a certain horror. Fassbinder

Based on Daniel F. Galouye's novel "Simulacron Three" Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 2 part TV production is a science-fiction classic that explores the notion of a computer-generated other world, pre-dating The Matrix by 26 years. Since its original broadcast in 1973 it has rarely been seen and following increasing demand the Fassbinder Foundation have restored this remarkable film.

We put together a pamphlet on cybernetics for the screening get it: 

Cybernetics recomposes globally and organically the functions of the general worker that are pulverised into individual micro-decisions: the bit links up the atomised worker to the figures of the Plan.  -- Romano Alquati 1963, p. 134 (translation mine). Quoted in Pasquinelli, p.6

The Cybernetic Hypothesis is thus a political hypothesis, a new fable that after the second world war has definitively supplanted the liberal hypothesis. Contrary to the latter, it proposes to conceive biological, physical, and social behaviors as something integrally programmed and re-programmable. More precisely, it conceives of each individual behavior as something “piloted,” in the last analysis, by the need for the survival of a “system” that makes it possible, and which it must contribute to.-- Tiqqun, ‘Cybernetic Hypothesis’ 

'The mass-produced hermit came into being as a new human type, and now millions of them, cut off from each other, yet identical with each other, remain in the seclusion of their homes. Their purpose, however, is not to renounce the world, but to be sure they won't miss the slightest crumb of the world as image on a screen.  

-- Gunther Anders, ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’, 1956.

 







Resources: 

Midnight Notes, ‘Conversation with a Demon’,
http://ge.tt/api/1/files/6Q0dvQa/0/blob?download

Tiqqun, ‘Cybernetic Hypothesis’, originally published in Tiqqun II, 1999 http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis

Gunther Anders, ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’, 1956.

http://thiva.egloos.com/2023093 

Matteo Pasquinelli text, with some translations of Romano Alquati's early work on cybernetics.
http://ge.tt/api/1/files/40VrLRa/0/blob?download

Graphics/Texts from http://www.processedworld.com/

Short text on Anders, Molussia: http://cinema-scope.com/features/burrus-abominable-dialectic-nicolas-reys-autrement-la-molussie/

A Situationist texts on Cybernetics; 'All the King's men': http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/8.kingsmen.htm
Guy Debord's 'Correspondence with a Cybernetician' (in French arghh): http://i-situationniste.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/correspondance-avec-un-cyberneticien.html

Noreen MacDowell and Isaac Julien Screening 28th March, 2013

As a special celebration of the life of Noreen MacDowell whose films on the Grunwick Strike we screened some time ago we're collaborating on a screening at n.o.w.here lab this thursday.

Full Unemployment Cinema

Noreen MacDowell and Isaac Julien

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Thursday, 28th March, Free, 7pm

no.w.here, 316-318 Bethnal Green Road, E20AG

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A special anniversary screening of two films made by Noreen MacDowell with the Newsreel Collective followed by Frantz Fanon, an early film by Isaac Julien. This screening is hosted at no.w.here and is put on in collaboration with Full Unemployment Cinema and John Barker. 

Full Unemployment Cinema 
A bunch of no good commies and anarchists showing films about work and the struggles against it since November 2007 

http://unemployedcinema.blogspot.co.uk/ 
twitter: #uncine 

n.o.w.here lab
http://www.no-w-here.org.uk/index.php?cat=1&subCat=docdetail&&id=354

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True Romance, 1981 
Made by Noreen MacDowell when she was squatting in Bow and features the youth of the area (including a very young Isaac Julien talking about sex), and then themselves improvising a party in which some of what is said is lived/acted out. 

Divide and Rule Never Again, 1978, 40 min, 16mm, projected DVD 
Divide and Rule Never Again by Noreen MacDowell set in Bow is about race interviewing Bengali youth and some white racists but ends with the triumph of the huge Rock Against racism gig in Victoria Park. 

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, 52 mins, 1996 
A film exploring the pre-eminent theorist of the anti-colonial movements of this century. Fanon's two major works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, were pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and colonizer. Isaac Julien integrates the facts of Fanon's brief but remarkably eventful life with his long and tortuous inner journey. Julien elegantly weaves together interviews with family members and friends, documentary footage, readings from Fanon's work and dramatizations of crucial moments in Fanon's life. Cultural critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Verges position Fanon's work in his own time and draw out its implications for our own.