The Project
What are we talking about
We want to tell a story. A story of people, technologies and places. The people are Italian hackers, the technologies are those that have changed this century, the places are where this story took shape. The medium is a video documentary, linked to a website to go further on his arguments.
Why we do it
We start with a clear idea: our future is intrinsically linked to the "web world", where we have relationships, we develop knowledge, we produce value. Knowing this world, what is inside and behind it, it's more and more important. But this world is not a magic made by large American corporations. All technologies, languages, programs, hardware, have a history, they live thanks to the work of people, and among those nodes and structures we are often asked to take choices. Italy, as many do not know, is one of the places where these stories intertwined with more intensity and complexity. These stories have been made by people who call themselves hackers.
We're telling the story of Italian Hacker
We want to build the story of the persons who made the history of technology in Italy, those who have put their hands inside codes, languages, protocols, adapters. We'll ask them to tell us what are we talking about when it comes to hacking, their point of view on the matter, the most important facts, the most intense moments and the choices they made, the technologies that have changed their life, and maybe ours. This story will be built by the people who made it. We would like to use this documentary as a weapon to shed light on the banal and stereotyped concepts we are used to deal with in relation to hacking. We would like to reconstruct a history that we see as mythopoeic, as it has been able to construct reality and mythes at the same time.
A long chain
Of facts and persons. We will compile a timeline that outlines what happened in the last 25 years of Italian hacking history in order to reconstruct a path that was articulated in continuous layers, enthusiasms and difficulties. The focus of the video documentary will be the interviews with the protagonists of this story. The key to proceed in the storytelling, one by one, will be a very simple question: "Who do we have to meet?". The damping action will come from knowledge, as a way to move past the memory of people, friendships and relationships.
Narrating the invisible
Places and computers. Telling something intangible such as technology and codes, through images, represents for us a challenge We'd love to give a shape to places that maybe did disappear: where did these people met to develop systems and strategies? What were the landmarks of their researches? Hackers stories often grow up in communities, bind to political movements, deep inside the political life of our cities. The places where we'll go will be sites of struggle and counter-culture, but also homes, closets, grasslands. The BBS network first, the world wide web later, they gave us a new idea of space, and they joined places and cultures. Shooting these places and their relationships will be a way to reclaim the strength and fascination of space and body in an era dominated by the virtual.
To whom are we addressed
The ask for knowledge is growing both inside and outside the places that have known hacking in its development. Improvised web enterpreneurs, students, the curious ones, or the fearfuls, are those to whom we want to show what we talk about when we talk about hacking, technology, computers. Hacking is a set of life choices, politics, positions, knowledge: we want to make people discover the fascination of all this. The technologies on which this community has been working for years are part of our future, a future that has to be written.
Where it all goes
The video documentary, a document that we want to push as far as possible, will be produced in Italian and English, under creative commons license. The project will be linked to a website under construction (this is it), where first of all we'll collect the resources already present on the web, available to expand the topics covered in the interviews: tutorials, how to, but also photos, film footages and so on. We'll also host all the backstage material for those interested: the complete interviews, the list of places and people, the images of our work etc.
Would you like to be contacted? write to frnsrn @ gmail. com