Film: Teknolust & Conceiving Ada

The HMKV is showing a film programme in the Schauburg and sweetSixteen cinemas in Dortmund in the context of the exhibition Computer Grrrls. Admission is free.

Teknolust
USA/DE/GB | 2002 | 79 min | german version
Conceiving Ada
USA | 1997 | 85 min | original version

Welcome and introduction: Darija Simunovic

Lynn Hershman Leeson has done groundbreaking work not only as an artist but also as a filmmaker. With actress and Oscar winner Tilda Swinton, she has made several feature films that have won numerous awards at international film festivals for their outstanding quality and innovative themes.

The first film "Teknolust" (2002) is an absurd, amusing and scientifically highly topical science fiction drama about cyber identities, biogenetics, gender constructions and sexual self-determination in the age of the Internet. The plot develops around the scientist Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton), who illegally creates three clones of herself. The artificial beings differ only in the color of their clothes and live in a closed cyberspace. Since they depend on the male Y chromosome for survival, Ruby, the femme fatale among the clones, regularly searches for men. Sexual contact with Ruby leads to impotence in her lovers and an allergic reaction triggered by a computer virus transmissible to humans. As the number of infected men increases, the FBI becomes aware of the clone family's machinations and begins to investigate.

With "Conceiving Ada" (1997), Lynn Hershman Leeson sets a cinematic monument to the historical personality Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace. The Duchess, better known as Ada Lovelace, was a British mathematician and is now considered the author of the first computer program ever. For the Analytical Engine - a mechanical calculating machine by Charles Babbage - she wrote the first algorithm, thus laying the foundation for the concept of the programming language.

In Hershman Leeson's feature film, the contemporary programmer Emmy Coer finds a way to communicate with Ada Lovelace in the past. Coer has plans to bring her role model Lovelace back to life through genetic engineering. The Countess of Lovelace, embodied by Tilda Swinton, is portrayed in the feature film as a visionary pioneer whose ideas are put in their place by social circumstances and rigid role models. Hershman Leeson addresses discrimination against women and their marginalization in the sciences. At the same time, she pays homage to a historically significant woman and honours her in the form of a science fiction film.