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Johannes Grenzfurthner was born in 1975 and grew up in the Austrian boondocks in a small town called Stockerau. Out of the womb, Johannes was drawn to nerd culture. “I grew up with only two TV channels, and I was very happy my dad got a VHS recorder as early as 1980. It opened up a whole new telematic (as it was called back then) reality for me. I could record TV on a tape, and watch it later! Whoa! And in 1983, the first video rental store opened in my hometown, the same year as the first Chinese restaurant. That was something.”
Like many geeks who grew up in the 1980s, he experienced geek culture at the beginning… before the dark times, before Disney bought, well, everything. “I wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema, but my parents didn’t care about my video consumption. I had a great variety of films I could pick from on tape. Close Encounters of the Third Kind stunned me, Convoy and Capricorn One made me cry for justice, and Poltergeist terrified the living, scrape-your-face-off shit out of me. And I remember when I first rented Alien. I couldn’t wait to get home and see it. But at the point where the beast should have burst out of the guy’s chest, there was nothing left to see except interference. All the freak-fans who had previously rented the movie had rewatched that scene so often that the tape was completely buggered. Oh my. Still, I had night terrors for days.”
Johannes’ interest in nerd culture was something of an obsession. “I was always interested in obscure crap. I loved science fact (Carl Sagan is still my only media idol) and science fiction, especially John Brunner and William Gibson. I always felt like a nerd, although there was no word for it in German. Later, on US Bulletin Board Systems, I learned about the term and immediately embraced it.”
Johannes Grenzfurthner is as much an artist as he is a nerd. His feature documentary Traceroute (which received a rave review right here on Film Threat) is now available for digital download and the movie is a pure delight for anyone immersed in all things about nerd culture from movies to technology, the internet and even sex. In this exclusive interview, Johannes reveals what it’s like to see the world wearing glasses attuned to seeing the positively geeky side of everything in life.
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