World on a Wire (Welt am Draht) | Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema
Join the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures for a film series featuring cyberpunk films like The Matrix, Ex Machina, Blade Runner and more! These films accompany the museum’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema. Cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction, first appeared in the early 1980s and uniquely captured the anxieties of that decade. Featuring near-future scenarios set in worlds that resemble our own, cyberpunk stories juxtapose technological advances with social upheaval, ecological crisis, and urban decay.
First conceived for West German television as a two-part miniseries by the extraordinarily prolific filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, World on a Wire leans into the paranoia inherent to a divided country in the rapidly evolving 1970s. Based on Daniel F. Galouye’s American science fiction novel Simulacron-3 (1964), Fassbinder’s tongue-in-cheek adaptation addresses the ethical concerns of simulated reality and the dangers of unchecked technological sentience. A delightfully labyrinthine tale that predates our current fascination with artificial intelligence and machine learning, World on a Wire brings into focus the blurry line between good and evil.
