[ B l o g / / Archive]


A tangled web: The net is the perfect medium for counter-information, analysing available data on the 11 September attacks, challenging official findings on the events and exploiting conspiracy theories.
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Bloggers and Parties: Can the netroots reshape American democracy?
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Greenland Ice Sheet Still Losing Mass: Data gathered by a pair of NASA satellites orbiting Earth show Greenland continued to lose ice mass at a significant rate through April 2006, and that the rate of loss is accelerating, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.
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China sucessfully tests new thermonuclear fusion reactor: Chinese scientists on Thursday successfully conducted their first test of an experimental thermonuclear fusion reactor, which replicates the energy generating process of the sun. The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) fusion reactor, nicknamed "artificial sun", was tested at the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Hefei, capital city of east China's Anhui Province.
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monochrom show // ++TAUGSHOW #6++ online: The flat hierarchies of talk shows are about as subversive as NYC Democrats smoking dope. But count us out! We won’t produce a talk show. Nope. We produce a TAUGSHOW! Which means: we dig it. Our guests are geeks, heretics, and other coevals. A joyful bucket full of good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair, condensed into the well known cultural technique of a prime time TV show.

[taugen; Viennese slang: to dig/love/adore something]

Host: Johannes Grenzfurthner
Content Manager: Roland Gratzer



Taugshow #6
Recorded Friday, September 15, 2006 at dietheater, Konzerthaus, Vienna. Duration: 1 h 47 minutes.

Vik Olliver: Nanotechnology and RepRap:
Vik Olliver is a 40-something longhair software developer, artist and volunteer firefighter who lives with his family (wife Suz, daughters Kate and Tamara) and many cats in the Waitakere Rainforest in New Zealand. Currently he is one of the driving forces of the RepRap Project (http://reprap.org/); which aims to create the first practical and programmable self-replicating machine.

Adia Martin: Fashion, Technology and Femal Sovereignty:
Adia Martin is a New York ex-patriate currently residing between Vienna and London. Having spent the past ten years of her life working in various different areas of the fashion industry, her primary concentration has always found its way back towards a historical foundation. Adia looks at how the change in the roles of women in society directly influenced fashion styles, tastes, and necessities. Because the 20th Century created some of the most rapid and significant evolutions in recorded history, it becomes easier to recognize how quickly what we wear is directly correlated to what we do.

Michael Bauer: 310 Chinese LED Throwies: Instantaneous beauty and dynamic collaborative pieces of artwork. What else is there to ask for?

Regulars:
In this month's "Gorgeous Wordz" column, Evelyn Fuerlinger will talk about the differences between the English and the German sound-systems, as well as about birds. Roland Gratzer talks about female pirates. And we have a special anniversary to celebrate.

Showband: Beata Pozitiva Vs. Alfons Bauernfeind

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Mexico's Two Presidents: On September 16, over one million people raised their hands in a vote to recognize center-left leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as the "legitimate president" of Mexico. Gathered in Mexico City's historic center, the delegates to the National Democratic Convention (NDC) agreed to inaugurate their president on November 20-ten days before the inauguration of the officially recognized candidate, Felipe Calderon. This act of civil resistance ushered in a new stage in an electoral conflict that has developed into an all-out battle for the country's future.
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Is Hysteria Real? Brain Images Say Yes: Out of political correctness and the word's blatent reference to women, the term 'hysteria' is rarely used anymore, but ask doctors and they will tell you that the phenomenon has not disappeared.
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Itsy Bitsy Bikini Guy: I'm Not Dead! Quote: "The man who co-wrote the song 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' had the unsettling experience this week of reading his own obituary — the result of an impostor who went through life claiming to be the author of the 1960s smash hit."
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monochrom work report // Cleaning the office! A humanoid, a logo, a shovel, a ceiling and two nuns.



Pic by Christoph Sonnleitner.



monochrom report // "Lord Jim Lodge powered by monochrom" is winner of Coke Light Art Edition 2006: We were asked to participate in the 2006 Coke Light Art Edition contest. Well. We won. And that's highly surreal. Here are some pictures form the ceremony. And the description of our concept.



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Allergy-free pets surprisingly simple: Non-allergenic cats on the market are a natural breed. Intro: >>This week witnessed an event that will have some animal lovers cheering: the arrival on the market of long-promised 'allergy-free' pet cats. But you might be surprised at how low-tech these cute kitties are — especially considering the almost US$4,000 price tag. The cats are being sold by Allerca, a company based in San Diego, California. It is currently taking orders for deliveries next year. Founder Simon Brodie says he started by trying to genetically engineer a low-allergy cat, but during the early testing stages the team accidentally stumbled on animals that seemed to be naturally sniffle-free. "Maybe you could say we got lucky," he says, with the "totally naturally occurring cat."<<
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Spike Lee's film recalls When the Levees Broke: "A Requiem in Four Acts", directed by Spike Lee, a two-part HBO documentary. Quote: >>As the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached, the usual media barrage of retrospectives interrupted celebrity murder stories and filled the tube with images of the haphazard fury of nature. As Tropical Storm Ernesto passed over Jamaica and headed for the Gulf of Mexico, politicians and engineers nervously insisted that there was a plan in place for New Orleans. And the week before the anniversary, Spike Lee's two-part documentary, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, premiered on HBO, making it clear that the continuing epic tragedy of Katrina is a failure on many levels which far exceeds a "natural" disaster. As Lee's title reminds us, it was not Katrina that destroyed New Orleans, but the flood caused by the breaching of the levees. Computer mock-ups had long predicted that the levees would not hold up in a severe hurricane, and recently the Army Corps of Engineers was forced to admit to human error in the levee system designed for the city.<<
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Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispossession and the Scramble for Africa: In his 2006 State of the Union address, George Bush finally put into words what all previous presidents could not bring themselves to utter in public: addiction. The United States, he conceded, is "addicted" to oil--which is to say addicted to the car--and as a consequence unhealthily dependent upon Middle Eastern suppliers. What he neglected to mention was that the post-Second World War U.S. global oil acquisition strategy--a central plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Roosevelt met King Saud of Saudi Arabia and cobbled together their "special relationship" aboard the USS Quincy in February 1945—is in a total shambles. The pillars of that policy--Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf oil states, and Venezuela--are hardly supplicant sheep within the U.S. imperial fold.
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East Asia's Dollars: Discussions of the sustainability of the US current-account deficit--trending upward from $800bn--rarely plumb the long-term motives of its creditors. Taggart Murphy analyses the historical roots of Tokyo's post-1868 geofinancial support for the ruling superpower, London or Washington, and the implications of China's rise for Japanese strategy.
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An infamous voyage: Transporting slaves from Africa to America was outlawed in 1820, but continued in secret till 1858. The last slave ship was the Wanderer. Quote: >> On July 4, 1858, a ship called the Wanderer left Charleston, S.C., and set sail for the Congo. Disguised as a luxury cruise ship, the Wanderer had first raised suspicion when it docked in Long Island and loaded far more supplies than usual for a casual cruise. Officials surmised (correctly, as it turned out) that the ship was a slave ship. In "The Wanderer," Erik Calonius brings to light the tale of the last known ship that brought slaves to the United States from Africa. Using newspaper accounts, letters and legal documents, Mr. Calonius, formerly a London correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and Miami bureau chief for Newsweek, reconstructs the journey in painstaking detail.<<
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Glimpses of a Genius Who Blazed His Paper Trail: Quote: "The 6,000 or so extant pages of text and drawings attributed to Leonardo da Vinci are thought to represent only about one-fifth of his output. Yet, remarkably, in a new show at the Victoria and Albert Museum here, just 62 yellowing sheets suffice to illuminate the endlessly curious and inventive mind of this quintessential Renaissance man. ... [T]he display, which runs through Jan. 7, sets out to explore how Leonardo used paper to brainstorm about the mysteries and mechanics of life. And it reveals him to be an early master of lateral thinking."
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J B Wock is a PHP script that writes its own blog almost every night.
The posts generated by J B Wock follow these steps:
1. J B Wock takes a famous quotation from a "Famous Quotes" RSS feed (this would be the seed of the process);
2. Then it finds synonyms for each of the words in the phrase. This process can happen from one to three times recursively (this is the transformation based on a simple rule);
3. Finally, the result is published as a new post in the blog (the outcome).
As with almost every blog, J B Wock's blog is open to comments. (via runme)
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this is japan, part 1: I've been on vacation in Japan recently, and I'd like to present you the first photo-gallery. I took many many many photos, and this is just the finest of the finest.

This, part 1, was shot mainly in Nara, a beautiful town east of Osaka. A huge buddha statue is located in Nara, housed by the biggest wooden structure in the world. Daibutsu (the buddha) is more than 16 meters high, and standing in front of him is just awesome.

The deer are sacred btw, and just as aweseome!

Part 2 will follow at some point...



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Coke Pepsi and the Politics of Food Safety: By Vandana Shiva. Intro: >>In a democracy, a ban on harmful products and activities is an expression of citizens' freedoms and rights. Bans protect citizens from hazards to health and the environment. That is why smoking has been banned in public places. That is why ozone-depleting substances were banned under the Montreal Protocol. That is why the Basel Convention banned the trade in toxic wastes and hazards.
Coke and Pepsi have firmly joined the group of toxic and hazardous products that need to be banned to protect the health of citizens and to protect the environment. On 22nd August, the "Coke Pepsi Quit India" campaign intensified its movement to ban Coke and Pepsi "with a ban Coke Pepsi" day of actions. Kerala has banned Colas. Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan have banned Soft Drinks in educational institutions and Government Canteens. And Coke Pepsi Free Zones are spreading across the country.<<
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The Principle Of Mediocrity: By Alexander Vilenkin. Quote: "A striking consequence of the new picture of the world is that there should be an infinity of regions with histories absolutely identical to ours. That's right, scores of your duplicates are now reading copies of this article. They live on planets exactly like Earth, with all its mountains, cities, trees, and butterflies. There should also be regions where histories are somewhat different from ours, with all possible variations. For example, some readers will be pleased to know that there are infinitely many O-regions where Al Gore is the President of the United States. In this astonishing world view, our Earth and our civilization are anything but unique. Instead, countless identical civilizations are scattered across the infinite expanse of the cosmos. With humankind reduced to absolute cosmic insignificance, our descent from the center of the world, a process begun by Copernicus, is now complete."
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Snail in your buttock:



The medical device currently used for intestinal research, the colonsope, causes patients great discomfort. At TU Delft, an alternative method has been developed, inspired by the way in which snails move. On September 18, researcher Dimitra Dodou received her PhD degree from TU Delft based on this research subject.
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Tell Us What's Going to Happen: Information Feeds to the War on Terror: Intro: "We want to know things before they occur. Anticipate, react, prevent. This idea is embedded not only in counter-terrorism policy, but in the cultural narratives produced by television and cinema. Television programs such as 24 or CSI, and movies such as The Conversation, The End of Violence, Minority Report, and The Siege are self reflexive mirrors of the U.S. war on terror. Through tricky technology systems like the Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX) and Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) and Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) and TIPOFF and AFIS and VICAP, America seeks policies and programs -- read this as machines and software -- that will anticipate terrorist attacks in order to stop them before they can occur. The desired outcome is complete deterrence. If this outcome was achieved, it would be the most mighty feat of prognostication and prevention ever conceived.
The reason? Doing so would require the real time synthesis and analysis of volumes of data equal to something like the number of stars in the universe. Criminal justice technology systems produce voluminous information flows. Billions of bytes of data are constantly on the move among police agencies describing individuals, their criminal histories, assets, debt, locations at particular times, purchase patterns, biometric identifiers (fingerprints, photographs, DNA samples) and other aspects of the people or the activities they are thought to have performed. At any given moment, thousands of inquiries are sent through dozens of regional, national, and international systems seeking answers to questions about people's identity, where they are, what they have done, or what more other agencies and agents know about these individuals. In 2005 the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC) averaged 4.5 million inquiries per day."
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Solar Tattoos?



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Profit, plague and poultry: The intra-active worlds of highly pathogenic avian flu. Quote: "In 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers – obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears of the state, helping warn of new border incursions. These incursions are posited as taking an avian form that may bring with it very unwelcome pathogens. Everyday avian observations and knowledges of migratory routes are being reinvented as a kind of border patrol, a first line of veterinary surveillance. Birdwatchers and others are being asked to look out for any signs that wild birds may be dying from the highly pathogenic form of avian influenza known as H5N1, one of sixteen or so strains of flu virus endemic to wild birds and transferable to domestic poultry and also, in the right circumstances, to pigs and other animals."
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Scientists Dscover Most Likely Host Star For Advanced Life: Sam Okoye, a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Science, ruminates on the likeliness of extreterrestrial life.
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Connected: How to get more music into your life: Out of the mess that is the music industry's battle against online piracy have emerged two basic legitimate business models for downloading music: the per-song or per-album charge, and the rent-a-music-library-by-the-month system. So which is better, and how do you get the best value for your music dollar? The answer may be surprising. "With a few well-placed strategies, you can leverage the subscription model to make your days and nights more musical -- at home, at the office, or on the road."
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Surveillance cameras, watching and talking! A new sound is hitting the streets of Middlesbrough... the sound of CCTV. Seven CCTV cameras in the town centre now have a sound facility which allows operatives to give advice or intervene in incidents as they happen. Quote: " “For example, if an operative now sees someone dropping litter, they can tell them to pick it up, or if they see an incident starting to get out of hand, they can give advice that will hopefully nip it in the bud. I think that it will give people extra confidence as they go about their business and re-enforce the message that Middlesbrough is a place that is constantly thinking about community safety."
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Dirty Dozen: The Pentagon's 12-Step Program to Create a Military of Misfits.
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Houdini's Impossible Demonstration: For a few years, magician Harry Houdini and British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, were friends. One was an arch-skeptic (Houdini), while the other was a true believer in Spiritualism (Doyle). Possibly hoping to show Doyle how easy it is to be fooled by mediums, Houdini once gave his friend an extraordinary demonstration, in his own home, in the presence of Bernard M.L. Ernst, Houdini's friend and lawyer. Ernst's memoirs reveal what happened that night.
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Extreme Diet Nixes Alzheimer's: Long been in the realm of alternative medicine, extreme caloric restriction is now being accepted by modern science as a viable treatment against Alzheimer's.
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Anyone Want To Buy Napster? Quote: "Napster has put itself up for sale and hired bankers to explore interest in the once notorious and now struggling music download service. Analysts have highlighted the service's dwindling subscriber base and failure to turn a profit."
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monochrom report // "Lord Jim Lodge powered by monochrom" is winner of Coke Light Art Edition 2006: We were asked to participate in the 2006 Coke Light Art Edition contest. The topic was "BRAVERY & INDIVIDUALITY, Courage To Create Your Own Luck" (haha!). Well, we took part. And we won.



Have a look at our strategic concept paper. For a world of radical beauty and exclusive bottles in small editions! In the end we are all individuals -- at least as long as nobody comes along and proves the contrary.
Celebration: September 21, 2006. Arena MQ, Vienna. (And be aware!)
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monochrom performance // Yoho! And a bottle of data! eSeL put the first pictures online.



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New Orleans cleared of 'toxic soup' scenario: Surveys show no evidence of long-term health risks caused by Katrina.
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Is Radio Losing Its Base? Quote: "While more than 9 out of 10 Americans still listen to traditional radio each week, they are listening less. As a result, the prospects of radio companies have dimmed significantly since the late 1990's, when broadcast barons were tripping over themselves to buy more stations. Radio revenue growth has stagnated and the number of listeners is dropping."
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monochrom exhibit // Soviet Unterzögersdorf at medi@terra: medi@terra, an international art and technology conference and exhibition, will take place in Athens/Greece, October 4-8, 2006. monochrom will be presenting the first episode of the adventure game "Soviet Unterzögersdorf".



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The Race for Nanoland: Is 'grey goo' about to eat the planet? Probably not, but there are real dangers with the development of nanotechnology that are not being addressed.
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New solar arrays unfurled on space station: The International Space Station spread its second pair of wings on Thursday after the newly attached solar arrays deployed successfully.
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Inside the Urban Crunch, and Its Global Implications: At the Venice Biennale, architects stare into a windowed, dystopian future, trapped within stylistic confines of their own making.
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Why Quantum Mechanics Is Not So Weird after All: Richard Feynman's "least-action" approach to quantum physics in effect shows that it is just classical physics constrained by a simple mechanism. When the complicated mathematics is left aside, valuable insights are gained.
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monochrom live show // Taugshow #6! The flat hierarchies of talk shows are about as subversive as NYC Democrats smoking dope. But count us out! We won’t produce a talk show. Nope. We produce a TAUGSHOW! Where people will be persons, even legal bodies. Which means: we dig it. Our guests are geeks, heretics, and other coevals. Taugshow is a tour-de-farce. A joyful bucket full of good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair, condensed into the well known cultural technique of a prime time TV show.

Guests:
Late Night, Lights And Lux with Michael Bauer.
RepRap, Nanotechnology and Free Beer with Vik Olliver.
Fashion, Technology, Hemline And Female Sovereignty with Adia Martin.
And lots of more.


[taugen; Viennese slang: to dig/love/adore something]

Location: dietheater, Konzerthaus, Vienna. September 15, 2006. 8:30 PM. In English language.
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Roboat:



Quote: >>In this passage we demonstrate the ability of a fully autonomous sailing boat to perform complex navigations in real water fields and we want to compare technical decision strategies to others in this project.
Sensors, navigation, controls and power supply are minimized to 3 kgs, an intelligent software operates the maneuvers and handles the peculiarities of sailing. Different agents get in this distributed intelligent system different tasks. The Roboat functions as corporeal technical testingtool and object of comparison for the exploration and visualisation of decision processes.
8th and 9th July 2006 French aeronautics university ENSICA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Ingénieurs de Constructions Aéronautiques) organized a regatta for autonomous controlled sailboats at the lake St. Nicolas De La Grave (near to Toulouse), the first competition of this kind in europe. Fully automatic sailboats no more than three meters long and controlled by onboard computers had to navigate a certain course. The jury payed special attention on 'tacking' - sailing against the wind.
InnoC's team (Raphael Charwot, Adrian Dabrowski, Matthias Hofmann, Karim Jafarmadar, Ira Lee Kuhn, Tobias Pröll, Roland Stelzer) competed successful. Five boats took part, InnoC's boat was the only competitor whose control and navigational system was completely on the boat and worked smoothly. Boat and system worked properly, even under difficult circumstances - during the competition wind speeds up to 20 knots (more than 10 m/s) have been registered.
Next step will intend to cross the Irish Sea in the course of the second Microtransat August 2007.<<
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British Headlines: The british print-media are masters in writing headlines. Anyone who isn't tickled into clicking the following link has some kind of defect. Wank Week to climax with girls' guide



Keith Olbermann commentary: Pretty startling commentary aired on MSNBC on the 9th of November by news-anchor Keith Olbermann, a name I myself, and presumably anyone outside of the U.S., have not heard before. It seems unusual viewing... outspoken, critical, long and smart. Give it a try, see what you think.
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How To Use A Shower:



(via DD)
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Woman Charged with Assault Using Dead Chihuahua: A Wentzville woman could get up to 18 months in jail and a $1,500 fine for hitting another woman over the head with a dead Chihuahua puppy. Lisa Hopfer, 34, was found guilty of third-degree assault and trespassing. The trial featured X-rays of the dead dog, a detective’s pictures of the dead dog, and testimony from the woman who was smacked over the head repeatedly by the dead dog.
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monochrom performance // Yoho! And a bottle of data! A performance dedicated to the Pirate Party movement.


(Picture: Jake Appelbaum)

Meeting point for masked pirates and tarted up royalists: 13.09., 8pm, monochrom office, Museumsquartier Vienna.
Meeting point for gaping landsmen: 13.09., 8.30pm in front of the Volkstheater main entrance.
(Performance is part of Paraflows festival.)



The Aura of the Digital: Essay by Michael Betancourt.
Into: >>By dividing the interpretation of an art work into several distinct "levels" it becomes possible to recognize a fundamental distinction between digital and non-digital art works, as well as realize the underlying ideology is based upon the illusion of infinite resources; as such it replicates the underlying ideology of capitalism itself -- that there is an infinite amount of wealth that can be extracted from a finite resource. It is an illusion that emerges in fantasies that digital technology ends scarcity by aspiring to the condition of information. The digital presents the illusion of a self-productive domain, infinite, capable of creating value without expenditure, unlike the reality of limited resources, time, expense, etc. that otherwise govern all forms of value and production.
Digital forms also exhibit what could be called the "aura of information" -- the separation of the meaning present in a work from the physical representation of that work. As digital works with the "aura of information" imply a transformation of objects to information, understanding the specific structure of digital art makes the form of the "digital aura" much more explicit. This clarity allows a consideration of the differences between the scarcity of material production in physical real-world fabrication versus the scarcity of capital in digital reproduction: the necessity for control over intellectual property in the virtuality of digital reproduction. Because capital is a finite resource itself subject to scarcity, yet also caught in the capitalist paradox of escalating value -- in the dual forms of interest and profit on capital expenditures -- there is the constant demand to create more commodity value in order to extract more wealth from society in order to maintain the equilibrium of the system.<<
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Grafikdemo:



Quote: "Grafikdemo is a modified Commodore CBM 3032 computer. Its inner life was replaced by a mechanics. A wireframe model of a teapot, soldered out of silvered copper wire, is gimballed inside the monitor cabinet. The model is varnished with green uv-active paint and lighted by four blacklight tubes, which are installed invisible inside the cabinet. The teapot can be rotated in any direction by using the numeric keypad. During the rotation, you can hear the electric motors and feel their vibrations."
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Explosives At The Nanoscale With 'World's Smallest Controlled Heat Source': Using nanometer scale analysis techniques and quantities too small to explode, researchers have mapped the temperature and length-sale factors that make energetic materials – otherwise known as explosives – behave the way they do.
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Bizarre case of consent: In a bizarre case, a jury was told that the 40-year-old man was accused of sexually assaulting the woman 11 times in her home in 2004 while some of her alter egos looked on and at times intervened. During the District Court trial that finished last Tuesday, the court was told three of the 33-year-old woman's personalities were present at one of the alleged incidents.
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The Theme Park That's Beating Disney: Last year Disneyland opened in Hong Kong. The park "has struggled a bit in its debut year in Hong Kong. Its park hasn't quite reached its first-year attendance goal of 5.6 million, and its had some hiccups along the way." By contrast another Hong Kong park is thriving. "In the past year, Ocean Park has experienced its largest attendance boom ever, luring customers with its cheaper ticket prices and diverse attractions like dolphin shows and a cable car ride with stunning views of the South China Sea."
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monochrom short // monochrom's "ME" @ Bleed: Our shortfilm "ME" is featured on the great videoblog Bleed.



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Australia, Pacific Islanders and the Politics of Independence: Australia's John Howard is drumming up more army battalions for future crises in the South Pacific. But as Hamish McDonald reports, this is addressing only the symptoms of the malaise in countries like Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, the result of populations abandoned halfway between tribal custom and the global economy.
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South Koreans race for space: Fast runners qualify for astronaut selection.
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Polyphasic sleep: Quote: "Polyphasic sleep involves taking multiple short sleep periods throughout the day instead of getting all your sleep in one long chunk. A popular form of polyphasic sleep, the Uberman sleep schedule, suggests that you sleep 20-30 minutes six times per day, with equally spaced naps every 4 hours around the clock. This means you're only sleeping 2-3 hours per day. I’d previously heard of polyphasic sleep, but until now I hadn't come across practical schedules that people seem to be reporting interesting results with."
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Braniff Airways - The Supersonic Future - 1975 commercial: In this 2-minute commercial, Braniff Airways gives us a glimpse of the wonderful future to come, in the form of supersonic air travel. There were just a few things they didn't figure on: The exclusivity and eventual failure of Concorde jets, the growth of global terrorism which would require increased pre-flight screening, and the biggest thing of all: that Braniff Airways wouldn't survive to the end of May, 1982.
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The Wicker Man: A look at the cult classic and its contemporary remake reveals two films with one message.



Neil LaBute's remake of this cherished cult classic has triggered a great deal of debate; a glimpse at the IMDB forum will reveal desultory outbursts of feeling both for and against, as well as the various shades of indifference, incredulity, and boredom that lie somewhere in-between. For some, its advent marks the limit of Hollywood's imagination; for others, it undermines what little remains of a British cinematic tradition. Either way, it may be interesting to lay the films side-by-side, stripping away pretension and prejudice—after all, challenging prejudice was itself the originals film's intention.
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Brain in a vat: In philosophy, the brain in a vat is any of a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, and meaning. It is drawn from the idea, common to many science fiction stories, that a mad scientist might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives.
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monochrom interview // monochrom @ Geek Entertainment Television: Exotic Cocktail Robots and Vienna Sausages:



Quote: "While recently in New York City for HOPE2006, we caught up with Johannes, the main instigator of the Austrian based art-technology-philosophy group called monochrom. Johannes explains Roboexotica, an annual competition and expo for robots that serve cocktails to humans. Is this all a sausage party or is there real meat behind all this? Come find out."
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Constructive biology? Think of the cell as operating system, and engineers taking the place of traditional biologists in retooling stripped down components of cells (bio-bricks) in much the vein as in the late 70s when electrical engineers were working their way to the first personal computer by assembling circuit boards, hard drives, monitors, etc. It's not an accident that the phrase "bio-hackers" is in the conversation, as this new crowd has a lot in common with the computer engineers who were around the homebrew computer club of the '70s leading the development of the personal computer. Central to this move to engineer biology, to synthesize life, is Harvard researcher George Church.



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Bad Faith and Distortions From the American Psychological Association: Protecting the Torturers: Essay by Stephen Soldz.
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Battle For The Internet About To Enter Crucial Phase: Quote: "Telecommunications firms salivate at the prospect of eliminating Net Neutrality requirements and setting up systems where websites that pay for the service will be more easily reached than sites that cannot afford the toll. And U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who has for many years been a dominant figure in communications debates on Capitol Hill, is determined to change the rules so that Internet gatekeepers such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner, can create an 'information superhighway' for those who pay and a dirt road for those who fail to do so."
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Moon mission ends with a bang: Last orbits for triumphant craft produce memorable photo album.
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Why does inhaling helium make one's voice sound strange? Craig Montgomery, chair of the chemistry department at Trinity Western University, explains.
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Scientists Say Several More Dinosaur Species Yet to be Found: Scientists believe nearly 71 per cent of all dinosaur genera -- groups of species -- that occupied earth are yet to be discovered and identified.
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Eco Next: The Mechanics of Hyperpraxis: How has the Starbucks logo become a symbol of the anti-globalization movement? How has the Nike 'swoop' gone from consumer fad to symbol of sweat-shop labor to rehabilitated mega-corp logo? By G. Willow Wilson.
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monochrom participation // Paraflows 06 - Annual Convention for Digital Arts and Cultures:
9 through 16 September 06. Vienna, Austria



High abstraction goals for local communities

In the year 2006, neither Amnesty International nor Greenspeace have been put out of work, yet new horizons of necessary political engagement have emerged that call on the abilities of computer scientists, lawyers and artists alike – and lots of them.

These alternative task forces have recently formed, like the state-of-the-art movement of Pirate Parties that originated in Sweden and strives to get techaware citizens elected into parliaments on a worldwide scale, the Big Brother Awards that report back and collect local cases of corporate technologialy abuse in more than 15 countries, or the Free Software Foundation that designs operation systems and licenses that can spread freedom from digital abuse in an already abusive environment. They all advise their politicians, lawyers and journalists in their free time to stop steering our societies into a direction where Europeans have little understanding of where it will lead: intimidated citizens, security-obsessed decision makers, atmospheres of faschism, powered by the IT-sector itself and its shareholders.

At this moment in time, participants in the Viennese netznetz-experiment succeeded by being entrusted 500.000 Euro every year, to distribute among themselves and their projects, obliging themselves to the task of stabilizing and re-designing their procedures collectively, step by step, and in a democratic fashion that nevertheless produces results. This complex task seems to be just like "rebuilding the plane as you are flying" (A. Limi). Yet by co-constructing the local workflows they are already changing the flows of cash and hardware, material and knowledge, information and inspiration in the city of Vienna. Seen from a personal point of view, a lot of them already look back on a hybrid education between the computer sciences, the social sciences and the arts, testifying with their own experience in the netznetz – process that the perception of scientific facts and artistic artifacts, tools for collaboration and devices for self-alienation, promising instability and outmoded routines may sometimes blend into each other rather paradoxically, as if both states were to be true at once, or on parallel dimensions.

But how are these two scales of endeavour related, both the organisation of a local production- and safety-net via the web and the care for interrelated issues like copyrights and patent approaches via international, distributed technologies and communities? The most immediate concern that invokes scrutiny are people. Because just looking back into the ideologies and technologies of the year 1968 or 1996 will not suffice to properly adress these new power constellations that have emerged between the social, the political, the legal, the technological and the personal aspects of our daily life. And be it in Vienna or elsewhere, in order not to paralyse our momentum, these complexities must be adressed in a innovative way, by researching and testing possible re-constellations and current models of collective collaboration for the long term. And by reminding oneself that, within all complexity, "the most important source of energy is the human being and what he or she believes." (J.A. Wheeler). Paraflows 06 will present different viable approaches to personal self-organization with a global bandwidth reach.

You can find details about conference, social events and exhibition on the Paraflows 06 homepage.



Well, a giant doll...



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Classic Reader: Quote: "We offer a large collection of free classic books by authors such as Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and many others. You can read, search and even add your own annotations to any of the classic books. A selection of author biographies and portraits are also made available. All functions of this site are free to use although some functions require free registration."
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The Sociological Implications for Contemporary Buddhism in the United Kingdom: Socially Engaged Buddhism, a Case Study: By Phil Henry. Introduction: >>Buddhist Studies has, for well over a century, been seen by many in the academy as the domain of philologists and others whose skills are essentially in the translation and interpretation of texts derived from ancient languages like classical Chinese, Pāli, Sanskrit, and its hybrid variations, together with the commentarial tradition that developed alongside it. Only in the last thirty-five years has there been an increasing number of theses, journal articles, and other academic texts that have seriously addressed the developments of a Western Buddhism as opposed to Buddhism in the West. As Prebish (2002:66) attests, based on his own 1975 experience of teaching Buddhism in the United States, "Even a casual perusal of the most popular books used as texts in introductory courses on Buddhism at that time reveals that Western Buddhism was not included in the discipline called Buddhist Studies."
Fundamentally, this paper addresses Buddhist identity in contemporary settings, and asks what it means to be Buddhist in the West today. This is the overarching theme of my doctoral research into socially engaged Buddhism in the United Kingdom, which addresses the question of how socially engaged Buddhism challenges the notion of what it means to be Buddhist in the twenty-first century. The scope of this paper is to portray part of that work, and, in so doing, it suggests methodological approaches for students of Western Buddhism, using my research into the identity of socially engaged Buddhists in the United Kingdom as a case study.<<
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Science tempers fears on climate change: The world's top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years. A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offers a more certain projection of climate change than the body's forecasts five years ago.
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The great Mexican election theft: By Ignacio Ramonet. The election was a clear case of fraud on a massive scale, as the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, agreed, while the 25 European Union foreign ministers expressed "grave concern”. Indeed the Netherlands foreign minister declared: "It is important that we convey in the clearest possible terms the concern of the European Union and member states over the result of the presidential election".
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SETI Requires a Skeptical Reappraisal: Early SETI efforts were marked by overly optimistic estimates of the probable number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest and to take a more down-to-earth view. Earth may be more special, and intelligence much rarer, in the universe than previously thought.
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Keeping 2-D cartoons alive in a 3-D world: So that this old art wouldn't be forgotten, an animation fan opened his own studio.
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NASA awards major Moon contract: Lockheed Martin to build next lunar capsule.
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Titanic: The Sequel: "As one journey ends...another begins".



Watch the wonderful trailer.
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How far can you drive on a bushel of corn? Crunching the numbers on alternative fuels.
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Fringe: Great bimonthly online literary journal.
We founded Fringe to fight against the homogenization of culture and the loss of revolutionary literature at the high-literary and popular levels. This loss of variety stems from the politics of market capitalism and mass media. Because larger retailers market to mainstream perspectives, magazines that cater to specific groups (feminist, Afrofuturist, environmental) find themselves going the way of the eight-track. Such journals provide the natural mechanism by which fringe writers mix into the mainstream. Without them, corporate media rules unopposed, eliminating competing voices, or worse, co-opting their style while stripping these voices of their content. To combat this trend, we founded a free and readily available magazine to disseminate progressive voices to everyone. Fringe is the noun that verbs your world. We are about writing that confronts and questions. We want to challenge perceptions, to drive readers to action. Fringe also provides a venue for artists who take their genres into the next paradigm—those who play with form, who work outside the box—those who are on the fringe. Fringe's online format wastes few resources, allows us to publish frequently, and lets readers and writers all over the world access us. Currently, Fringe offers a variety of genres every two months, publishing a single contributor in each genre.
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Everyone wants to be an axeman... Why are guitars – basically planks of wood with strings attached – selling in greater numbers than ever?
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Vatican: Harry's With The Devil! The Vatican's chief exorcist has condemned Harry Potter. "Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil," says Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope's 'caster-out of demons'."
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monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
[more]

Booking monochrom:
[Europe]
[USA]

External monochrom links:
[monochrom Wikipedia]
[monochrom Flickr]
[monochrom blip.tv]
[monochrom GV]
[monochrom Youtube]
[monochrom Facebook]
[monochrom iTunes]
[monochrom Twitter]
 


Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 2 / The Adventure Game

Climate Training Camp

Krach der Roboter: Hello World!

Slacking is killing the DIY industry (T-Shirt)

Carefully Selected Moments / CD, LP

Freedom is a whore of a word (T-Shirt)

#fullboycott

International Year of Polytheism 2007

Santa Claus Vs. Christkindl: A Mobster Battle

Could It Be (Video clip)

Pot Tin God

Hacking the Spaces

Kiki and Bubu and The Shift / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Privilege / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Self / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Good Plan / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Feelings / Short film / Short film

Sculpture Mobs

Nazi Petting Zoo / Short film

The Great Firewall of China

KPMG / Short film

The BRAICIN / Short film

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 1 / The Adventure Game

I was a copyright infringement in a previous life (T-Shirt)

Brave New Pong

Leben ist LARPen e.V.

One Minute / Short film

Firing Squad Euro2008 Intervention

RFID Song

A tribute to Honzo

Lessig ist lässig

I can count every star in the heavens above -- The image of computers in popular music

All Tomorrow's Condensations / Puppet show

Bye Bye / Short film

Revaluation

PC/DC patch

Proto-Melodic Comment Squad

myfacespace.com

The Redro Loitzl Story / Short film

Hax0rcise SCO

Law and Second Order (T-Shirt)

They really kicked you out of the Situationist International?

Death Special: Falco

Applicant Fisch / Short film

When I was asked to write about new economy

Taugshow #6

Taugshow #7

Taugshow #9

Taugshow #10

Taugshow #11

Taugshow #14

Taugshow #15

Campfire at Will

Arse Elektronika 2007, 2008, 2009 etc.

The Void's Foaming Ebb / Short film

Remoting Future

When you / Short film

Elf

Free Bariumnitrate

Toyps / Typing Errors

ARAD-II Miami Beach Crisis

The Charcoal Burner / Short film

Digital Culture In Brazil

Hegemonchhichi

Nation of Zombia

Lonely Planet Guide action

CSI Oven Cloth

Dept. of Applied Office Arts

Farewell to Overhead

Google Buttplug

Fieldrecording in Sankt Wechselberg / Short film

Dark Dune Spots

Campaign For The Abolition Of Personal Pronouns

Zeigerpointer

Space Tourism

In the Head of the Gardener

Entertainment (Unterhaltung) / Short film

Cthulhu Goatse

Nicholas Negroponte Memorial Cable

Coke Light Art Edition 06

Experience the Experience! (West Coast USA/Canada Tour 2005)

April 23

Overhead Cumshot

Irark / Short film

Wart

Instant Blitz Copy Fight

A Patriotic Fireman

A Micro Graphic Novel Project

Noise and Talk

The Exhilarator

H&M

SUZOeG Training / Short film

The Flower Currency

Gastro-Art/Gastrokunst

A Holiday in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf

How does the Internet work?

Paraflows 2006 and up

Special Forces

Coca Cola

About Work

Turing Train Terminal

Me / Short Film

Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network

Doormat

Some Code To Die For

The Year Wrap-up

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Metroblogging

Project Mendel

Display, Retry, Fail

Manifesto of Ignorantism

Actionfilm

Towers of Hanoi

Heisenberg

Opto-Hedonism

Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere

Milk

Mobutobe

Brandmarker

We know apocalypses

452 x 157 cm² global durability

A Good Haul

Blattoptera / Art for Cockroaches

Minus 24x

Gladiator / Short Film

Eden

An attempt to emulate an attempt

Paschal Duct-Taping

Laptop Crochetication

Russka

Somewhere in the 1930s

Soul Sale

The Department for Criticism against Globalisation

Dot Smoke

Georg Paul Thomann

Nurgel Staring

War On

Let's network it out

Nude

Mackerel Fiddlers

Whales

Disney vs. Chrusov / Short film

Bulk Mail

Easter Celebrations

Mouse Over Matter

Condolence for a Crab

Force Sting

Turning Threshold Countries Into Plows

System

A Noise

A. C. A.

Hopping Overland

Achy Breaky Heart Campaign

Hermeneutic Imperative III

Holy Water / Franchise

Roböxotica // Festival for Cocktail-Robotics

Spears

Engine Hood Cookies

Ikea

The Watch

Creative Industry 2003

This World

Cracked Foundation For The Fine Arts

Sometimes I feel

Fit with INRI

Growing Money

Catapulting Wireless Devices

Buried Alive

Illegal Space Race

Magnetism Party

Brick of Coke

1 Baud

Scrota Contra Vota

Direct Intervention Engine

Oh my God, they use a history which repeats itself! (T-Shirt)

Administrating:

Dorkbot Vienna





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