What would you do, when you danced half naked in the middle of the street in front of a camera & years later the world starts worshipping your image but you don't want all of this?

"The Story of Technoviking" follows an early successful Internet meme over 15 years from an experimental art video to a viral phenomenon that ends up in court. Originally filmed in public space at a political demonstration, labelled by a community, remixed and shared by tens of millions, the clip's images can't be removed anymore from the collective memory nor be deleted from the servers that are located all around the world.

Opinions of artist, lawyers, academics and fans are mashed up with a big variety of online reactions and show the dilemma that is created when our fundamental right of the protection of our personality is in conflict with our fundamental right of free speech, when user behaviour gets in conflict with 100 years old laws that our legal system is based on. To what direction should our culture and society develop in the future? And how can one make a film about it when officially its not allowed to show the protagonist?

Matthias Fritsch (artist, author of videomeme Kneecam No.1 aka Technoviking, DE)

Matthias Fritsch lives and works in Berlin. He studied Media Art at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG) in Germany and Film, Fine Art and Curating at Bard College, Centre for Curatorial Studies (CCS), New York State, USA. He has made several short and long movies, and media-based installations. He focuses on the digital communities formed within Internet video platforms and examines their importance in the formation of the contemporary cultural production. Fritsch's filmic works focus on issues of authorship and property. He traces the potential and boundaries of related cultural practices by way of participation. Since 2010 Fritsch is the artistic director of the annual Moving Silence events in Athens and organizes other international events within this platform for contemporary silent film.

A GAME OF YOU: Into the Social Media Vortex

#GamerGate, Technovikings & Smart Media as a Psychedelic Webcomic - survival in the wild torrents of our digital lives.

The Third Event of the Disruption Network Lab in cooperation with Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien and in collaboration with SPEKTRUM.  Inspired by the work of sequential artist and graphic novelist Gabriel S Moses.

With: Gabriel S Moses (sequential artist and graphic novelist, IL/DE), Zoe Quinn (video game developer and artist, Crash Override Network, USA), Matthias Fritsch (artist, author of videomeme Kneecam No.1 aka Technoviking, DE), Pedro Lopes (computer scientist, artist & hardware thinker, PT/DE). Oliver Lerone Schultz (researcher, DE). 

Go to event on the Disruption Network Lab page