About Plokta
Plokta film festival took its name from the New Hackers Dictionary. Plokta is the acronym for Press Lots of Keys to Abort. It’s what users do when their machine crashes, slows, breaks down. In frustration they start trying out random new actions. The keyboard gets a beating.
Plokta is a festival where the moving image feeds ideas about technology. It is a meeting place for creative disciplines, thinkers, and artists. Plokta has an interdisciplinary and open take on technology. It explores what technology is and what it does—and what we make of that.
There is no abort.
Technology is digital, analog, electrical, steam-powered. It is cell phones, microwaves, zip codes and bricks. Major shifts in society play out at the intersection of technology and society, and that will only grow in the future. It can be difficult to fully grasp the place technology occupies in our lives, and to work out how to relate to it. Plokta is about making our relationship with technology more open, reciprocal and meaningful. Because technology is here to stay. It was always here. There is no Abort.
The mechanical Eye.
Film is an expanded window on the world. Film investigates the world we live in; the world you live in; the world I live in. At Plokta, films about technology bring together filmmakers, designers and artists to tell stories about the past, present and future of technology. They help equip us to inhabit the modern world, to shape it and view it with a critical eye.
Material culture.
Plokta loves to share stories about the secrets of technological objects and structures. Technology often seems like a black box—it’s just there. It doesn’t have to be like that. Unfolding technology, box by box, turns a world of inanimate, dead objects into a world that lives and speaks. A technological object is never just the thing itself: it constantly redefines what it means to be human in the present. Its roots spread deep into the history of all the ideas and knowledge that came before. Its branches stretch into the future—a future where our aspirations will materialize as technological objects.
Plokta is always on the lookout for new artists, thinkers, organizations, program makers, journalists, and cinemas who would like to join us in our mission. If you’ve got ideas, if you’d like to help us open up discussions about society and technology—let us know!
The first evening of Plokta. By Aram de Groot. Partners
The Institute of Network Cultures analyzes and shapes the terrain of network cultures through events, publications, and online dialog. Its projects center on publishing on urgent issues, alternative revenue models, critical design and making, digital counterculture, and much more.
LIMA is the platform in the Netherlands for media art, new technologies and digital culture. LIMA represents artists and supports them in the presentation and development of new work. LIMA also preserves the memory of Dutch media art through its digital repository and conservation services.
Credits
Jurian Strik is the founder, director and head of program of Plokta festival. The program was developed in close collaboration with the members of the selection panel: Niek Hilkman, Sunjoo Lee, Sanneke Huisman and Daan Vermeulen. The publication 'Readme' has been made together with Miriam Rasch (Intstitute of Network Cultures). The night program has been curated by Juliette Lizotte and was a collaboration with iso. Plokta is supported by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and the Creative Industry Fund NL.
Special thanks: to Jiří Mocek (design), Rob Hoefakker (code), Philip Chemayel (assistant director), Callum McLean (text), Fey Yen van Kolfschoten (production), Steve Green (text), Aram de Groot (video), Mark Prendergast (video), Geert Lovink, Daniel Engelsman.