Screening of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"

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Screening of "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"
Date 2014/08/08
Time
Location ACTA
Type Other
Contact User:Chotee, User:Skinnr

Techinc is going to be screening three documentaries, known together as "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" by Adam Curtis.

Entry is free. We'll have reasonable priced drinks available. If this is your the first time in our space, try to come by a bit early (or stay afterwards), to get a tour of our hackerspace.

You will need to arrange for your own food. There is a microwave and we also often order food. There are some plans to make Roti that evening, but this will depend on interest. If you would like share in the Roti, please leave a message, so we can accommodate for you.

About the documentaries: A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines they have built. Although we don't realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us.

  1. 19:00-20:00: Love and Power. This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems - without hierarchy.
  2. 20:00-20:45: Time for food and ingestion or other substances.
  3. 20:45-21:45: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components - cogs - in a system.
  4. 21:45-22:00: Break.
  5. 22:00-23:00 The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed - so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure.

About the maker: Adam Curtis is a documentary film maker, whose work includes The Power of Nightmares, The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, Pandora's Box, The Trap and The Living Dead.

Attending

If you plan to attend, please add yourself to the list.