Oliver Herbrich

'Thinking machines' and 'people thinking as machines' (super-computerprogrammers who have internalized computerese) are perhaps two of a kind. But clashes with the 'real world' are preprogrammed for these machines of flesh and blood. The film traces humankind's striving to discover itself again in its mechanical creations, from the effort to construct automatons in Switzerland some 200 years ago, to a pinnacle display of the 1980ies achievements: a robot playing Haydn's 'Genesis' at the World Expo in Japan.

Mr Stephen Fry introduces you to free software, and reminds you of a very special birthday.

Explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. This exquisitely crafted inquiry into the rationale of this mythic figure situates him within a late 20th century web of technology—a system that he grew to oppose. A marvelously subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this insightful documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.

It happened more or less by accident; the people who made it happen were amateurs; and for the most part they still are. From his own Silicon Valley garage, author Bob Cringley puts PC bigshots and nerds on the spot, and tells their incredible true stories. Like the industry itself, the series is informative, funny and brash.

"The UNIX Operating System" is a documentary that Bell Labs made in 1982 about UNIX's significance, impact and usability. Even 10 years after its first installation, it's still an introduction to the system. The film was geared towards software developers, computer science students and programmers and contains interviews with primary developers Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, and many others. While widespread use of UNIX has waned, most modern operating systems have at least a conceptual foundation in UNIX.

Somewhere on the internet is a land where communities pretend to live out a survivalist fiction. The avatars of the directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours there, creating a fascinating film resulting from their encounter with these communities. The “players” reveal their fears and fantasies, in an at times unsettling blurring of the real and the virtual.

In 1981, Wau Holland and other hackers established the Hamburg based Chaos Computer Club (CCC). The idiosyncratic freethinkers were inspired by Californian technology visionaries and committed themselves to hacker ethics. All information must be free. Use public data, protect private data. But not everyone followed the rules. Computer technology was still in its infancy and the emerging Internet became a projection screen for social utopias. What has become of them? The story of the German hackers, told by the protagonists themselves in a montage of found video and audio material.

Commissioned for the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) exhibition The Future & Other Fictions, this essayistic collage work explores the cinematic world of cyberpunk, from sprawling dystopian megacities to the digital playground of cyberspace.