neural online


 
 
 > News archive  > Neural Magazine  > Neural Station  
 > emusic  > new media art  > hacktivism  

Italian version

.hacktivism

06.06.03 Hippies From Hell, a film on dutch hackers.
Holland is a country where the growth of new media has been going hand in hand with constant social and political initiatives. Particularly in Amsterdam, since the beginning of the Nineties, there have been many interesting initiatives which touched the demo-scene, the publishing activities, with the historic Hacktic fanzine, which was founded in the Eighties, and the Internet, with the foundation of the 'ethical' provider xs4all in 1993. These last two phenomena are the subject of the documentary 'Hippies From Hell', which tells about this historic group of people who could reprogram their world, use the machines to achieve their goals and live happily enough. Led by Patrice Riemens' charisma, they organized, trough the years, the open-air festivals, contributing significantly to the proper definition of 'hacker' and his vision of creative reconfiguration of his own dimension. Sponsored by the Waag.org foundation of Amsterdam, this film, with his usual succession of interviews and documents, contains funny and enlightening cues and is, coherently with the hacker ethic, freely downloadable in the divx and quicktime formats.