Movie: Traceroute

Presented at The Eleventh HOPE (2016), July 22, 2016, 10 p.m. (60 minutes)

Artist and lifelong nerd Johannes Grenzfurthner takes us on a personal road trip from the West Coast to the East Coast of the USA to introduce us to places and people that shaped and inspired his art and politics. Traceroute wants to chase and question the ghosts of nerd-dom's past, present, and future. An exhilarating tour de farce into the guts of trauma, obsession, and cognitive capitalism. The film features interviews with Matt Winston, Sandy Stone, Bruce Sterling, Jason Scott, Christina Agapakis, Trevor Paglen, Ryan Finnigan, Kit Stubbs, V. Vale, Sean Bonner, Allison Cameron, Josh Ellingson, Maggie Mayhem, Paolo Pedercini, Steve Tolin, Dan Wilcox, Jon Lebkowsky, Jan "Varka" Mulders, Adam Flynn, Abie Hadjitarkhani, and more. A question and answer session will follow the film.

Presenters:

  • Jason Scott
    Jason Scott's official title at the Internet Archive is "free-range archivist", which means he spends a very large amount of time acquiring a very large amount of data. He founded textfiles.com in 1998 and continues to warp minds daily as a result.
  • Kit Stubbs
    Kit Stubbs is a non-binary/queer/pansexual roboticist, maker, and entrepreneur who's more interested in people than in technology. Kit earned their PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008 and later launched the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity (effing.org), a nonprofit whose mission is to reduce sexual shame by fostering sex-positive artists and educators. They blog about technological empowerment for sexuality and pleasure, including their experiences and creations, at toymakerproject.com. Kit also organizes teasecraft-boston, a meetup group for sex/kink-positive makers (teasecraft.com). They are excited to be back at HOPE after presenting "The Sex Geek as Culture Hacker" at HOPE X. You can also see Kit's work featured in Johannes Grenzfurthner's film Traceroute.
  • Johannes Grenzfurthner
    Johannes Grenzfurthner is an award-winning director, artist, writer, and researcher. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria and Durango, Colorado in the USA. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally-acting art and theory group. He likes to engage in "urban hacking", or, more specifically, "context hacking", a term that Grenzfurthner coined. He directed the dark sci-fi comedy Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl, the feature documentary Traceroute, and is currently working on several other movie projects (Tycho!, Sierra Zulu, Nothing To Hide). He is one of the most outspoken researchers in the field of sexuality and technology, and one of the founders of "techno-hedonism". He is head of Arse Elektronika (sex and tech festival) in San Francisco, Hedonistika (food tech festival in Montreal and Tel Aviv), and host of Roboexotica (festival for cocktail-robotics) in Vienna. He teaches art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria, and is a lecturer on culture jamming at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria.

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