CiTiZEN KINO is a public event series which mixes media activism plus analysis, curated film screenings, performance, and public discussion. They are community artists, writers, independent media activists, VJ/DJs, and event producers. Collaborations have included Transmediale Festival, Haus Der Kulturen (HKW), Volksbühne Theater, Piranha Music, Chaos Communication Congress, Hellerau Theater in Dresden, Dokumenta, Ars Electronica, Kulturbrauerei, MS Stubnitz, Czech Zentrum Berlin, C-Base, Noisebridge, EFF, ATA: Other Cinema, CellSpace, Omni Commons, Journal Of Aesthetics and Protest, Regenbogenfabrik (cinema), RogueArt (Paris music label), etc.
Through an expanded cinema format, they investigate their current dismal scenarios of living in a hyper-industrialized world shaped by a variety of “fracking” industries and exploitative, profit-seeking mentalities. While most of them by now have been exposed to the new toxic forms of petrochemical energy production, the methods of hydraulic fracturing invented in 1947 by the fossil fuels industries are also a perfectly grisly metaphor for the monstrously expanded extraction techniques of capitalizing on all human communications and social interactions. Through various media clips, they will provide an overview into what Shoshana Zuboff and others have illuminated as the deeply penetrating “Surveillance Capitalism,” which has become the central economic engine of the data industries. They might also call it the new modus operandi of transforming humans into digital beings. In the legendary words of hacker pioneer John Gilmore, they look for ways to “route around these problems” in order to reclaim and reconstruct an embodied and sustainable coexistence within the full spectrum of living organisms.
The XLterrestrials are an arts and praxis species which has been collaborating with a wide variety of arts, sciences, technologies, and humanities fields for nearly two decades. And they have been producing CiTiZEN KINO events internationally since 2011, which utilizes their experiences in the tactical media and culture jamming genre/movements which sprouted in the 1980s and 1990s, and which also took inspirations from earlier practices pioneered by the Situationists, Dada, and Surrealism - all of which can be considered to some extent to be the forebearers of today’s creative and resistant strains of hackerdom.
For HOPE, they will present a special streaming edition, whereby they go against the grain of all the Zoomy-surveillance exuberance in our “corona-reboot” predicaments. They will offer a live “silhouette version” of their community events at a Berlin venue, whereby their team and local participants will be playfully anonymized behind a projection screen, which is also the surface for the films that will be presented for the topics analyzed. They will be like “shadow puppets” commenting on the media clips, or something in the vein of Mystery Science Theater 3000, heckling this horrible B-movie disaster we all find ourselves immersed in during these Trumpy-dumpster-fire times.