THE NET
(DAS NETZ)
Dir. Lutz Dammbeck, 2003
Germany. 115 min
In English and German with English subtitles

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 – 5 PM
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 – 7:30 PM

“How do computers, LSD, and hippies fit together?”

Hovering in a space between documentary and film essay, German multidisciplinary artist Lutz Dammbeck’s THE NET is a meandering line connecting the various dots between the recently deceased Ted Kaczynski, LSD, the CIA, hippies, and the internet. Structurally the film acts as a concept map, following word bubbles and their connecting lines as Dammbeck literally draws them.

THE NET uses Kaczynski and his backstory (a subject of CIA experimentation while a math student at Harvard?) to explore the loss of reality and its replacement with the virtual. Kaczynski’s refusal of this world is contrasted in the film by the characters of that ilk that he sought to destroy. Those who accepted and championed the global network and interconnectedness; like Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand, literary agent (and Epstein pal) John Brockman, the physicist and philosopher Heinz von Foerster, and even computer scientist David Gelernter, a victim himself of the Unabomber.