In the past days, I came across two different documentary projects centered around programming and computer culture. They stress how essential it is to keep a historical, critical and human-centered record of the evolution of computer- and software-culture :
6502, Tape, Arcade
Jason Scott – historian, archivist, and filmmaker, creator of textfiles.com, founder of the Archive Team, and author of two essential computer-culture documentaries: BBS (on Bulletin Board Systems) and Get Lamp (on text adventure games).
At this point, there are two days left for Jason Scott’s fundraising call on Kickstarter, which is addressing not just one, but three new documentaries – The 6502, about assembly language programming, Tape, “a meditation on the medium of tape”, and Arcade. Scott has already exceeded his goal of $100,000, and hopes to raise $150,000.
A message from Jason Scott:
Hello World
On the other hand, Hello World will be a series of three documentaries focussing on open source artistic programming environments: Processing, Open Frameworks and Pure Data. Having worked with these languages on some projects, I’m very impatient to see this.
Hello World is being directed by Ultra-lab, a company based in Madrid and Marseille, in collaboration will Raul Alaejos, who has already been directing Arduino, the documentary. This project is also calling for crowdfunding, with a goal of $27,000 that still has 48 days to go.
Hello World presentation clip: