MyCreativity - Opening Night Screenings

Some visitors of MyCreativity’s opening night might have been a bit surprised when they found out where it took place. The contrast between the friendly squat named Chequepoint at Damrak 16 and the overly capitalist surroundings could hardly have been bigger. The fact that the building used to be a bank might compensate for that.

As the rain came pouring down all different kinds of people, students, academics, professionals, artists and squatters, started mingling upstairs in a gezellige atmosphere entertained by a DJ and free drinks.

The screenings started off with Imbattibili, a 2006 short by Chainworkers showing a report of a protest for better social security held in Milan in 2005. Several demonstrators are asked how they cope with their poverty due to the harsh system in Berlusconi’s Italy suffering from an economic depression. These questions are asked not in a conventional way though, but rather in an inspiring manner; “if you’re able to manage having a decent life under these circumstances”, the protestors are told, “you can’t be less than a superhero!”.

This new context brings a smile to everybody’s face every time, and it gets even more funny when a little cape is given for the superheroes to fly away, making the image complete. You must give some credit to the filmmakers for giving these people some self-respect again, considering the bad social-economic position they’re in.

The second screening, Talent Community: IO Design Office, is also a short report from Lars Nilsson on a system in Sweden in which freelancers get together in a company to benefit from each others creativity, a common brand name and a network, but to avoid the classical hierarchical system of a company. Lars has a quite unconventional way of filming and editing which gives the film a bit of a amateurist feel. But of course I might just be mistaking Swedish dogma-style documentary making with incompetence.

The story is very inspiring though. Who likes to work for a boss anyway? Isn’t this system, which became popular during the industrial revolution, a bit out of date? People tend to work harder if they know they’re solely responsible for their own income, and don’t have somebody else telling them what to do. Still though, they might need the social surroundings offered by a company and the (creative) input of fellow people to get inspiration over a cup of coffee or a game of table tennis. Next to this the collective has one brand name and an extended network which creates better opportunities for everyone involved. This system of a collective of individual CEO’s might turn out to be a good option for the future of the creative industries (in Western Europe anyway).

The last screening, On Blood and Wings, is according to the official description

about the multitude battling capitalism. Giving a vampire twist to
Marx in unveiling the crucial mechanism of capitalism (”to make more and more
blood out of blood”), it shows the problems of the Multitude fighting the
vampires to conquer capitalism towards a free and just society. The video is put
together from found footage out of a dozen different vampire movies. A voice
over reads the political text. The video is published under the GNU public
license.

Blatantly anti-capitalist and pro-communist this movie might have fitted in the squat where it was showed, but could hardly be taken serious. The voiceover made the story feel like a production sponsored by Stalin himself. Comparing capitalism with vicious vampires craving for blood is a funny metaphor, and I hope that was all it was; a joke. The idea behind it is interesting, but the way the voice over mentions the “war between capitalism and the Multitude” made me laugh out loud.

On Blood and Wings is available as a MP4 (80MB) download

Joe Trippi - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Book Review

Joe Trippi seems like a cool, idealist guy who is very fanatic for the good cause, in this case the democratic party and issues like healthcare and poverty. His growing up and getting into politics reads like a novel; you almost start feeling the same as Trippi during all his ups and downs. Miserabely failed campaigns, opportunistic candidates, personal problems,nothing is left unspoken.Trippi is a experienced campaigner and so there are a lot of things to be learned from this book. The way it handles new technologies though might turn out to be a bit too optimistic.


Trippi tells how the Howard Dean for President campaign got involved in using the internet as a means of getting popular around the country. After initial distrust by the candidate himself and his staff a cooperation with the website MeetUp.com turns out to be such a enormous succes that Trippi gets a carte blanche. They start a blog and organize meetings for Meetup.com-members all over the country. At the end of the year a larger sum of money has been donated to Howard Dean than to any democratic candidate in history.

The book is very interesting to read, but maybe for the wrong reasons. The look-behind-the-scenes is amazing. At one point Trippi tells the story of a candidate who makes a pro-choice ad, and then decides he might as well make a pro-life ad as well; the filmequipment is paid for anyway! Secondly, the story of a candidate getting more and more popular, breaking records, and then finally making a fool of himself in front of millions of people reads like a boys book. The messian messages of democracy coming back, people getting involved again and the old elite getting blown away sounds, only two years later, a bit old fashioned though.

The problem with Trippi’s look on the developments in the Dean campaign might be that he was too close, and got too caught up in the enthousiasm of everything that now he thinks we’re at the dawn of a revolution.The revolution will not be televised, but we’ll sure ass hell be able to see it on
YouTube…