Movie: “Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl”

Presented at HOPE X (2014), July 18, 2014, 11:59 p.m. (60 minutes).

A post-apocalyptic science fiction nerd agitprop comedy feature directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner.Running time: 72 minutes. Languages: English and German (with subtitles).(more info at www.monochrom.at/gstettensaga)The growing tension between the last two remaining superpowers - China and Google - escalates in the early 21st century and results in the global inferno of the "Google Wars." Civilization came to a grinding halt. But there is still hope. This is the story of a new beginning....Furtherfield calls it "hackploitation, reimagining the makerspace as grindhouse." Film Threat gave it 5/5 stars and calls it "the must-see indie of 2014." Cory Doctorow praises it as "surpassing and delightful weirdness." Jason Scott calls it "the best kind of low-budget filmmaking... it is like watching an absurdist play by Beckett, if Beckett decided to work on the Mad Max franchise." Richard Kadrey thinks it is "a mad post-collapse satire of information culture and tech fetishism." And Jens Ohlig (CCC, Wikimedia) says it's "impressive."The film was co-produced by art tech group monochrom and the media collective Traum and Wahnsinn, and created for the Austrian television channel ORF III.


Presenters:

  • Johannes Grenzfurthner
    Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder and artistic director of monochrom, an internationally-acting art and theory group. He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the "Arse Elektronika" sex tech festival in San Francisco, host of "Roboexotica" (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics, Vienna and San Francisco), and just finished his first feature film (Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl). Recurring topics in Johannes' artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, subversion, science fiction, and the debate about copyright and intellectual property.

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