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If you don't know the history of the most active cyberpunk group in Italy, here is:
The Decoder and ShaKe history: seizing the times.
ladies and gentlemen, goodmorning. Todays program opens with... bzzz... bzzz... Decoder signifies decodifier... Were like many Frankensteins, composed of human members and artificial elements created by technology. I've seen one whose hand had three fingers, with the thumb and index finger, substituted by a pair of pliers and functioning like a crooked beak. A small antennae came out of his mouth and he spoke in megahertz to a woman who had no ears, but instead two parabolic dishes to capture television messages. Not being able to comprehend each other, the two made love, in such a way that it excited my pity, now with clogged movement from the wheels on his feet, now facilitated by her tongue, magnetic-tape-made, sixty minutes long, while following the rythym of the electronic drum that beat in their chests. From this incest, DECODER was born, the son of communication, of diversity, and of provocation. It has no more mutations like man, it's completely technological. A small automaton, self composed by many means of communication assembled anthropomorphically with the greatest esteem of speaking a universal language. I hope that you can meet it and speak to it, if you can, wish yourself a good future, and I remind you that the transmissions are taken tomorrow morning, with DECODER it means...
With these words we opened the first number of the "DECODER" magazine in 1987. The group founders are formed of diverse cultural and political experience: anarchists, punks, communists, liberals and autonomists, all working in the field of communication - music, video, radio, graphics, literature, computers, photocopying and mail art. In reality, the project was born two years earlier from inside a bookstore in Milano.
Over there, the memory.
(nearly a scene from a science fiction novel)
At this point it's necessary to tell a little of the history of the situation of the "movement", or what's called the underground scene in Italy. Here, whether you believe it or not, at the end of the seventies we were almost at the point of revolution. Illegal behaviour had taken a mass dimension and was diffused to an enourmous level that was called the "counter-power". In a few words: demonstrations, occupations of schools, self reduction on ticket prices at concerts, expropriations - or massive theft at supermarkets, and violent attacks on the police, became everyday events. The authority had no degree of control over the situation, and the air that was breathed was very particular. Clearly, all of this influenced the behaviour and culture of thousands of youth. There was the sensation of having power and being able to change the course of history. Unfortunately a series of armed groups mixed up "the sensation of having power" with the "flight of power", and they radicalized the attack to prime a violent response from the state, which reacted by arresting 12,000 people in two years and proclaimed a special legislation, that was one of the hardest in the world. Improvisationally the air of freedom changed to an atmosphere of lead, that made a black hole, aspacial and temporal gap between the seventies and the growing eighties. The chaotic streets became deserted, post-atomic, where junkie zombies strolled, destined to die a short time after; they were the survivors of the atomic bombardment at the end of a dream. The party was over.
From the unscarred wounds of the social body monsters are born
In this atmosphere of grand suffering a strange link was created with the past, and it's political action. There were people who tried at all costs to avoid the cultural force of the state to reconquest the ground floor, to cancel the human data-base and the memory of the years of the big dream, and who, on the contrary, were absolutely deprived of memory for generational reasons, they tried to open new streets of subversion. Like this, by a proceeding of social genetics that could be defined as monstrous, the birth of a counterculture that saved the skin of many people: the punk. In a monstruos manner, copying the english experience, but with the originality of an incredible cultural and political collage. The devastating force of a few hundred kids had renewed a categorie of radical political action in Italy. In only five years, they counted tens of punk collectives, they occupied houses and abandoned factories, transforming them into workshops of communication to make music, punkzines, or just to stay together. This way of radical transformation of urban spaces with strong countercultural connotations that was to be spread and called a few years later from the journals of the power of "the movement of the self managed social centers" ("movimento dei centri sociali autogestiti"). Between the absence of memory and no future, the punx created a temporal dimension, essentially that of the "present".