Arse Elektronika 2012
San Francisco, USA

4PLAY: Gamifuckation and Its Discontents

Call for papers, talks, workshops, performances, and GAMES.
[In addition to traditional talks, workshops, and papers, this year we are also accepting submissions of games. This can include digital games, street games, LARPs, social rulesets, procedural game-art, or other forms, for demonstration, presentation, or debut during the conference.]

What is the history of sexual games, particularly in the pre-digital era? What were the fairground and peepshow precursors in titillation? What was the design history of the “love tester” machine?

Why are game metaphors so prevalent in narratives of sexual conquest, and how did popular games in history influence the thinking of contemporary lovers? What can we learn about Roman gaming culture from Ovid's Ars Amatoria? What determines the many definitions of "cheating" in each of those contexts? How do the procedural rhetorics of modern game design encourage objectification of women?

How might contemplative gaming teach us to free ourselves from the tyranny of the climax?
How does the concept of the 'magic circle' in games coincide with safe spaces for sexual exploration? How do players act out transgressions of sex and gender expectations within the relatively safer spaces of games? What can we learn about social scripts and expectations from looking at society through a ludological lens?

What is the relationship of sex and games to the recent 'non-human turn' in arts, science, and philosophy? How might games engender empathy and understanding towards the non-human? What is the technological equivalent of Alan Moore's plant-sex issue of Swamp Thing? Could a game help you contemplate how a mantis fucks, or what it feels like for a fern to spore?

Beyond the simple human-to-human interfaces of the now-almost-quaint developments of sex machines and teledildonic, how might game design interact with biometrics and haptic feedback to create entirely new techno-sexual situations?  Game-based learning and medical rehabilitation has been used in the past for stroke victims and the disabled to re-learn their bodies; how might those same techniques allow further bodily exploration towards positive pleasure? How much might BDSM simulators borrow from virtual pet trainers? How is predicament bondage like game design, and what can the two learn from one another?

If we are headed towards the 'gamepocalypse' envisioned by Jesse Schell, how might that affect our sex lives and our sexualities?

Is sex in danger of gamification?

If so, how can we stop it?

Deadline: July 1, 2012

Please send submissions to office AT monochrom.at

Bolsheviks! It is our most cheerful pleasure to inform you about exciting Letters Of Intent we received!
If all goes according to our Two-Year plan -- and we will receive the necessary funds to create Sierra Zulu -- we envision to work with two terrific performers!

Honor and praise to Amber Benson and Michael Ostrowski -- the steadfast warriors for peace in the whole world! Long live the friendship and the unshakable unity of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf!

  

The terms guerrilla communication (and communication guerrilla) refer to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Communication guerilla is a specific style of political action drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for political interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification. The starting point for the panel and its reflections on communication guerrilla is a rather trivial insight: information and political education are completely useless if nobody wants to listen. Guerrilla communication doesn't focus on arguments and facts like most leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In its own way, it inhabits a militant political position, it is direct action in the space of social communication. But it doesn't aim to destroy the codes of power and signs of control. It prefers to counteract the omnipotent prattling of power by distorting and disfiguring the meanings. Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, they focus on detourning and subverting the messages transported. But what's new about all this? Nothing. But standing on the shoulders of earlier avantgardes, communication guerilla doesn't claim the invention of a new politics or the foundation of a new movement. It is merely continuing an incessant exploration of the jungle of communication processes, of the intertwined and muddled paths of senders, codes and recipients. The aim is a practical, material critique of the very structures of communication as a basis of power and rule. The internet offers fascinating possibilities also in a quite different sense: Beyond its reality, the web is an urban myth, and perhaps the strongest and most vital of all. Let's get inter-active!

We define the 'Zeigerpointer' as images (in the scope of printed media reporting) of crime scenes, locations of accidents as well as other locations in which some kind of thing has happened that can no longer be seen because the reported happening is already over and no traces are visible (either because none were produced or because they were already removed during the reinstatement of the status quo). Because in these cases there is nothing to take a picture of, the photo journalist generally asks certain people – eyewitnesses, concerned parties or somebody in charge – to point to the spot where 'it' happened. 'Zeigerpointers' can unambiguously be defined with a couple of criteria they have to fulfil and therefore distinguish them from other pictures of people pointing at something. The reported event must not be visible through any other means than the pointing at the spot where 'it' happened.

We got new examples! Look and point at them!
And if you should spot new Zeigerpointers in the media: submit them!

Whether the residents of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf realize it or not, their small village is under scrutiny. With an explosion happening inside Soviet territory, the small group of UN peacekeeping soldiers stationed at it’s borders are about to be thrown into a conspiracy of industrial espionage, a media frenzy, and political intrigue.

More updates about Sierra Zulu's actors!

Today we are delighted being able to introduce you to: The Yes Men and Gerald Votava!

Our corpo-pranking friends will play two small, but very fitting roles — and Gerald Votava will be a real douchebag.

 

monochrom wanted to set things straight at GDC 2012.

Roland finally created the monochrom press collection for 2011. Enjoy.

Link (PDF)

BB and LS enjoyed our Sierra Zulu prequel "Earthmoving"... do you?

Link BB
Link LS

Another day at the United Nations Offices in Vienna. The Austrian Foreign Affairs Ministry invited members of the European Protocol Service, the UN Strategic Command Center for Central Europe, the United States Air Forces and a regional politician from Lower Austria to talk about the future of Soviet Unter-WHAT?!

Want to learn to know our film team? Well... have a look! Here is the entire list of our heroes of work!

How did we do it? Here are all blog posts about the production of Earthmoving!

Support SIERRA ZULU!

Roboexotica is the annual festival where scientists, researchers, computer experts and artists from all over the world build cocktail robots and discuss technological innovation, futurology and science fiction.Until recently, no attempts had been made to publicly discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out. Cheers!

Roboexotica is a coproduction of monochrom, Shifz and the Bureau for Philosophy.

December 1-4, 2011 in Vienna, Austria.

Link
Facebook Link

"The title for the 12th edition of Pixxelpoint 2011 is appropriately enigmatic: LETS GET READY..., merely defines a space of engagement driven forward by a generative force: 'to begin again from the beginning' for those who seek what formulates new media art in its fluent transition between the various manifestations, which can take on new meanings in multiple contextual re-configurations no matter what of their materiality or mediality. Especially when considering the articulations from the fundamental/historical register to what this could foster at the intersection of new media art's "mission, its destiny."

December 2-9, 2011 at Pixxelpoint 2011 - Let's Get Ready, Bevkov trg 4, 5000 Nova Gorica, Slovenia.

Link to monochrom's BRAVE NEW PONG.

The fourth 'Wolfgang Lorenz Memorial prize for Internet-Free Minutes' has been awarded to A1 Telekom Austria CEO Hannes Ametsreiter by the Monochrom artists' collective. He won the booby prize for his rejection in February of the idea of net neutrality, saying the operator owns the technology and infrastructure and therefore should have the right to decide how it is used. The prize is named after the director of Austrian broadcaster ORF, who made a scatalogical remark in 2008 about young people disappearing into the internet. Lorenz said TV would remain the top medium with or without young viewers.