All Creatures Welcome

With »ALL CREATURES WELCOME« the ZKM presents a documentary about the hacker scene around the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). Director Sandra Trostel and members of the Karlsruhe Chaos Computer Club Entropia e.V. will be available after the screening for questions about the film and the Chaos Computer Club itself.

With the call »use hacking as a mind set« we dive together with the filmmaker into a kind of documentary »adventure game« and explore the world of »computer freaks«, as they called themselves at the founding meeting of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in 1981. We discover an open, free-spirited society. The events of the CCC are a kind of utopian real-world mirror of the virtual spectrum. We come across angels, activists, robots and furries, coders and makers. We learn what a »hack« is, why »lockpicking« can be important, how a cellular system works. We immerse into the game and become part of the community, which is as inclusive as it is demanding.

But outside this community, the challenges are immense in an era in which social certainties and institutions are increasingly eroding. Models of supremacy, economy, social order, technology and science are questioned constantly. National laws are repealed and transformed into global structures in the social practice of the Internet. While the global network would structurally allow a radical renewal of democracy from representation to participation, in realpolitik more and more states are moving towards authoritarian societies. In the process, the largest surveillance machinery in human history emerged  just like this.

We see how the hacker culture faces these challenges and what inner conflicts it deals with. We learn that our lives are not determined by given truths, but that our way to work, makes us evolve, suffer or dream. In this way, the CCC events become a possible blueprint for social wrap. Here, self-organisation, freedom of speech and critical discussions merge into a colourful, polyphonic chorus, far beyond social norms and capitalist constraints: »Be excellent to each other!«