Film
Art & Power: Lutz Dammbeck – The Net (Das Netz) (2004)

Sun, 09/15/2019
National Gallery of Art

Following his September 2019 visit as artist-in-residence at the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, German director and media artist Lutz Dammbeck will tour the USA with his film series Art & Power: Lutz Dammbeck featuring 18 of his documentaries and animation films. All films from the tour will be made available for rental and educational streaming by the DEFA Library.

The Washington, DC leg of this tour will include three screenings of Dammbeck’s work, two of which will be followed by Q&As and discussions with the filmmaker himself. The film program, including Lutz Dammbeck’s appearances at the National Gallery of Art on September 15 and at the Goethe-Institut Washington on September 16, has been made possible with support from Wunderbar Together: Germany and the U.S., the DEFA-Stiftung, and the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The Net (Das Netz – Unabomber, LSD & Internet)
Germany, 2003, 121 min., b&w/color, documentary, Director and Screenplay: Lutz Dammbeck

Followed by a Q&A and discussion with Lutz Dammbeck.

In 1996, the FBI captured American domestic terrorist and former mathematics professor and anarchist author Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who understood himself to be battling the increasing technologization of the world. In the mid-20th century, a host of intellectual developments—including cybernetics and systems theory, multimedia art, new concepts of psychology and military research—came to the fore and became relevant in influencing and controlling communications and mass behaviors. With the development of the internet in the 1980s, the question arose: What does the unlimited development of information technology mean for human society?

This compelling and provocative documentary explores how modern technology influences social relationships, affects people’s minds and potentially replaces reality with virtual realities. It interweaves excerpts from an exchange of letters between the director and Ted Kaczynski with interviews with leading American eyewitnesses, including New York publisher John Brockman, American writer and co-creator of the Whole World Catalog Steward Brand and physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster. The Unabomber’s story is presented as an extreme case of how individual identity can disappear in a global virtual world.