Opening night: Core Dump

For the opening night, Plokta invites you to a series of shorts giving a taste of what's in store during these five days. Kicking off the festival, we're very proud to host the Dutch premiere of Core Dump by the South African filmmaker and artist Francois Knoetze.

Core Dump is series of four short films. Together they form a poetic and political exploration of the relationship between cybernetics, colonialism and utopias. 

A “core dump” is the recorded state of the working memory of a computer at a specific moment in time. If a crash occurs, the computer is able to recall this ‘imprint’ of its previous state. This oddly poetic ‘memory’ of a computer forms the basis of this four-part sculptural and video series, extending the metaphor of a crash to the impending breakdown and unsustainability of the global capitalist techno-scientific system.

Kinshasa (2018), Shenzhen (2019), New York (2019) and Dakar (2018) interweave found footage, performance documentation and recorded interviews. Each chapter draws from audiovisual archives to discover local and global networks of technologies, people and capital. Together, they form narrative portraits of a global machine on the brink of collapse. In these stories of interconnections across time and space, you’ll discover the nervous system of the digital Earth.

The film will be introduced by media critic Geert Lovink.