Our relationship to technology is changing. Heavy machinery, which epitomized progress back in the industrial age, now seems headed the way of the dinosaurs. Virtual and nano-technology suggest new, as-yet-unexplored ways that humans may soon interact with the artificial world. But as we look over the precipice into the next millennium, theory and superstition cloud our perceptions. Utopian and dystopian predictions about the next stage of this relationship battle for our imaginations.
It wasn't always thus. In earlier times, our interactions with machinery were much more practical, sensual, and egalitarian. The daily cooperation workers maintained with heavy equipment in factories and steel mills forged a complicity in which man and machine had no need to demonize, politicize, or idealize the other.
The movements which have attempted to resurrect our intimate bond with technology, such as Futurism and the "industrial culture" of the 1970s and 1980s, devolved into bourgeois fantasies, which pertained little, if any, to the workers who actually spent their days in close contact with machinery. These romantic visions ended up as fetishes, indulged by people who never came into contact with technology on its own terms.
As we speed towards an unknown future, this program of films looks back at previous forms of industrial culture. Perhaps within these documents, culled from the archives of Communist, Nazi, and capitalist societies, there are clues to re-imagining our relationship to technology. In addition to these historical perspectives, the program includes glimpses of new paradigms offered by artists and other visionaries experimenting with forms that this relationship may take in the future.
In its 56 years of existance as either the Hermann Goering Werke or the Voest Alpine, from Nazi War and Propaganda machinery to Austria's version of the Wirtschaftswunder and its downfall in the late 70s, the steelworkers in Linz represent the forefront of society's shifting approaches towards life and labor. The steel mill provides an ideal backdrop to this glimpse in the rear view mirror.