235.000.000.000 / 777.000.000.000.000: Intervention by Oliver Ressler at the main station in Zurich, eBoard, 2006.
During the exhibition at the Shedhalle a new piece made for the electronic billboard of the Zurich main train station will be shown. The piece displays the foreign debts of Africa in relation to the damages which were caused by colonialism and slavery on this continent. If it is possible to elicit the foreign debts of Africa, which were tripled between 1980 and 2000, out of the World Banks databanks (235 billion dollars for the ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ 2004), then the calculations of the damages caused by colonialism and slavery represent a disparate and much more difficult undertaking. At the occasion of the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001 the African World Reparations and Repatriations Truth Commission brought forward a calculation based on comprehensive research and announced the sum of 777 trillion dollars. The claims of the African states were calculated using the reparation numbers of Germany for the victims of the Nazi-Regime as a point of reference. Out of fear of amend claims the Western countries deny any responsibility for colonialism and its aftermath and decline a guilt confession. Link Mouse-trounauts: The goal of the Mars Gravity Biosatellite Program is to send the mice into near-Earth orbit inside a one-meter space ship simulating Mars' gravity, then bring them back to Earth. It won't be the first time mice have flown in space, but it will be the first time mammals of any kind have lived in partial gravity for an extended period. The spin of the spacecraft will create an effect on the mice equivalent to Mars' gravity.
Link Pint-sized Car Engine Promises High Efficiency, Low Cost: MIT researchers are developing a half-sized gasoline engine that performs like its full-sized cousin but offers fuel efficiency approaching that of today's hybrid engine system--at a far lower cost. The key? Carefully controlled injection of ethanol, an increasingly common biofuel, directly into the engine's cylinders when there's a hill to be climbed or a car to be passed.
Link Inside out Guattari's Anti-Oedipus Papers: Felix Guattari met Gilles Deleuze in Paris shortly after the events of May 1968, through a mutual friend . Over the next twenty-five years, he would co-author five books with Deleuze, including, most famously, the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1981). Their collaboration, a kind of French version of Marx and Engels, sparked enormous interest and curiosity: what had led them to undertake their joint labour? How exactly did they work and write together?
Link Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe Has Retired: Wickramasinghe is most famous for his assertation that "Life did not start here on earth but in space".
Link Labor Dispute Could Shut Canadian Film Shoots: Quote: "A strike threat looms over U.S. film and TV shoots in Canada after local actors said Thursday they could form picket lines to fend off North American producers' demands for steep pay cuts."
Link The Bomb Project is a comprehensive on-line compendium of nuclear-related links, imagery and documentation. It is intended specifically as a resource for artists, and encourages those working in all media, from net.art, film and video, eco-intervention and site-specific installation to more traditional forms of agitprop, to use this site to search for raw material. The Bomb Project has gathered together links to nuclear image archives (still and moving), historical documents, current news, NGOs and activist organizations as well as government labs and arms treaties. It makes accessible the declassified files and graphic documentation produced by the nuclear industry itself, providing a context for comparative study, analysis and creativity.
Link No welcome for Serbia in the EU: Nations within the European Union are hardening their attitudes towards migrants from those eastern European countries that have recently joined, or soon hope to join, the EU. Meanwhile the western Balkans, though promised entry, have been left to wait.
Link Can Wikipedia Ever Make the Grade? "Wikipedia's supporters often portray the site as a brave new world in which scholars can rub elbows with the general public. But doubters of the approach — and in academe, there are many — say Wikipedia devalues the notion of expertise itself."
Link Brand new substance created from water: Scientists claim they have created an alloy of hydrogen and oxygen molecules by using X-rays to split highly pressurised water.
Link monochrom TV show // Taugshow #7 is 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! 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.
Taugshow #7 // ~110 min. Taugshow #7 / Guests: Ryosuke Tei: Ryosuke Tei (currently Subotron Artist in Residence) is the Creative Director of Furi Furi Company. Tei-san founded Furi Furi Company in 1998, and is the creator of Girls Power Manifest and the Bash figure series, as well as the innovative RPG Giftpia for the Nintendo Gamecube in Japan. He is considered to be one of Japan's most important figures in the character and game design scene. AniNite Special: The AniNite is the largest festival of Japanese pop culture held in Austria. AniNite members Silvia Groniewicz and Richard Pyrker will tell us about the AniNite concept and Aya and Schu, two female Cosplayers talk about their obsession and will present their newest creation. David Dempsey: David Dempsey is an ADDled informationmaniac who has replaced his mostly dysfunctional long-term memory with the web and small electronic thingies. Await his report. A video message comes to us from Eddie Codel inside the infamous Hat Factory in San Francisco, Kalifornia, Untied States of Ameerika. Regular guest Evelyn Fürlinger's topic is "Semantics, Syllables, and Sounds" -- and our showband consists of Peter Natterer and Ingmar Versolmann. Yeah! And lots of more.  [taugen; Viennese slang: to dig/love/adore something] Download / Link The Evolution of Senso-Brutalism: Electronic Aesthetics of Force in Music : Industrial – Minimal Techno – Gabba. Sonic injections to the braincells about deviant musics by the London-based writer and critic Alexei Monroe, best known for his books about Laibach/NSK.
Link monochrom review // monochrom mention in "Pranks 2" review: V. Vale's RE/Search Publications will soon release "Pranks 2", the follow-up to their legendary "Pranks" book (published 1988). monochrom is featured with Georg Paul Thomann. Eye Weekly mention our interview in their review.
Art makes up the final section of Pranks! 2, with the funniest stunt courtesy of Georg Paul Thomann. A member of the Viennese Actionists and peripherally involved in early punk, Thomann is a complete fabrication. He was invented as a project for the Sao Paulo Biennale by the Austrian art collective Monochrom. As they say in their interview, "It's not the first time a fake artist was invented but it's the first time a fake artist represented a whole country at a giant art fair." Take that R. Mutt."Pranks 2" can be ordered online. Eye Weekly / Link DAB should be the new wave, not medium wave: Why Has Audio Technology Stalled? Quote: "Today, everybody should be able to enjoy music reproduced much better than a 1980 standard audio CD allows. Instead, people seem to be happy with music systems that are distinctly inferior to that, such as DAB radio and compressed music files. People care about picture resolution: they buy cameras with more megapixels, prefer DVD to VHS and are increasingly willing to buy hi-def TV sets. But they don't seem to care about sound resolution - or not enough to spend money on it."
Link America: Freedom To Fascism: Quote: "Fahrenheit 9-11 won the "Palm D-Or", then "America: Freedom To Fascism" deserves the whole tree [...]"
Link Viking Landers May Have Missed Martian Life: NASA's twin Viking spacecraft may have missed signs of life during their examination of the Martian surface 30 years ago. Researchers now say that the landers' experiments were not sensitive enough to find life, perhaps not even in some earth soil.
Link Weapons of mass financial destruction: Last month a major US hedge fund, Amaranth Advisors, lost more than half its assets in a week, speculating on natural gas prices. The company proved correct the chief worry of such major financial institutions as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund: that financial reality is now out of control.
Link For £11,100, Rights To An Unknown's Lyrics: An unknown London singer-songwriter harnessed the power of eBay to auction his words -- and it worked. "Jonathan Haselden has spent the last four months marketing his lyrics as a way of raising money to promote himself and his music. The idea is that individuals and companies can buy song lines, use them in any way they wish and, if all goes to plan, get a share of the royalties when the song is successful."
Link monochrom residency // Jake Appelbaum / monochrom artist in residence: An interview with Jake Appelbaum who'll be monochrom artist in residence in December 2006 and January 2007.
Link Explosions in Paint: Caryn Coleman (Art Blogging LA) writes: "Environmentally friendly paint, bottle bombs, and an abandoned building not only make for a good time but make for a painting explosion! It may be an advert for Sony Bravia but it's wickedly cool. Oh why oh why can't all art explode?" Oh boy, she's right... watch the behind the scenes documentary...
 Link Robotic Chair Falls Apart, Reassembles Itself Autonomously:
 A seemingly simple, sturdy, wood-veneer chair has become an online video hit. With its "brain" in its seat, the chair collapses into a disheveled, disconnected heap; its legs then slowly find each corner of the base, connect back together and eventually, the chair stands upright. Link Self-proclaimed Vampire Says She's Not the Only One: A self-proclaimed psychic vampire explains to University of Kentucky students about the three branches of modern vampirism.
Link Why YouTube Is Worth So Much: Quote: "What's so unique about YouTube is that most of the content on the site is this conversation between people. The interesting thing is that the conversations are happening in videos."
Link monochrom & Shifz panel // Roböxotica 2005 / Studio talk featured on Boing Boing: The panel with Jake Appelbaum, Francesca Birks, Kal Spelletich and Cory Doctorow, hosted by Johannes Grenzfurthner, is featured on Boing Boing.
Link How Military Recruiters Pitch to Latinos: PowerPoint Racism... Intro: >>In a 1958 CIA information report on revolutionary activities in Cuba, the agent in charge wrote "Che [Guevara] is fairly intellectual for a Latin." A racist assertion such as this was not uncommon in government documents. Throughout the Cold War, official bureaucratic language and content continued to be influenced by long-standing"scientific" theories about national character and racial psychology.
Those of us engaged in anti-racist activism and research are well aware that many racial stereotypes with origins in earlier centuries persist in corporate boardrooms, universities, and shop floors across America. But although we know the conservatives' claims about "level playing fields," "the end of racism," and "post-civil rights society" are hollow rhetoric, we can still be stunned to find 19th century images and assumptions being reproduced in public spaces at the beginning of the 21st century. As has been widely reported in the media over the last two years, the Pentagon's interest in young Latino men and women peeked in the late 1990s when demographic indicators revealed that Latino youth would be the largest pool of military age youth in coming decades. Because Latino youth were (and continue to be) underrepresented in the military and because their educational and economic opportunities are limited compared to other groups, recruiting strategists have been busy concocting a series of well-funded "Hispanic initiatives." For almost a decade, the Pentagon has thrown millions of dollars at Spanish-language recruitment campaigns and promoted fast-track naturalization procedures for non-citizens. Even laudable proposals that would provide provisional residency for non-citizen students so that they could attend college (the DREAM Act) have been salted with covert military options.<< Link Breeding for God: From Prospect / Quote: >>The modern western world is inseparable from the idea of secularisation. From Socrates's refusal to acknowledge the Greek gods to Copernicus's heretical idea that the earth revolved around the sun to the French revolution's overthrow of religious authority, the path of modernity seemed to lead away from the claims of religion. In our own time, the decline in church attendance in Europe is seen as evidence that secular modernity has entered the lives of ordinary people. Some optimistic secularists even see signs that the US, noted as a religious exception among western nations, is finally showing evidence of declining church attendance. But amid the apparent dusk of faith in Europe, one can already spot the religious owl of Minerva taking flight. This religious revival may be as profound as that which changed the course of the Roman empire in the 4th century.
In his remarkable book The Rise of Christianity, the American sociologist of religion Rodney Stark explains how an obscure sect with just 40 converts in the year 30AD became the official religion of the Roman empire by 300. The standard answer to this question is that the emperor Constantine had a vision which led to his conversion and an embrace of Christianity. Stark demonstrates the flaws in this "great man" portrait of history. Christianity, he says, expanded at the dramatic rate of 40 per cent a decade for over two centuries, and this upsurge was only partly the result of its appeal to the wider population of Hellenistic pagans. Christian demography was just as important. Unlike the pagans, Christians cared for their sick during plagues rather than abandoning them, which sharply lowered mortality. In contrast to the "macho" ethos of pagans, Christians emphasised male fidelity and marriage, which attracted a higher percentage of female converts, who in turn raised more Christian children. Moreover, adds Stark, Christians had a higher fertility rate than pagans, yielding even greater demographic advantage.<< (via 3quarksdaily) Link Long Gone John Movie: "The Treasures of Long Gone John" is a film on LGJ, the owner of Sympathy For The Records Industry. He's an avid collector of art and even started his own toy-company. This movie features interviews and footage of such people like Coop, Mark Ryden, Frank Kozik, Shag, Robert Williams.....and endless list of big names in the US west-coast art-scene. Check out the trailer below, it looks great, with an insanely good soundtrack, too. Here's hoping someone will bring that movie to Austria.
Link monochrom & Shifz panel // Roböxotica 2005 / Studio talk online: As part of Roböxotica 2005 (festival for cocktail robotics) we recorded a panel discussions about technology and social aspects of technology in the studio of Okto, the Viennese community TV station.
The panel with Jake Appelbaum, Francesca Birks, Kal Spelletich and Cory Doctorow is now online. Host: monochrom's Johannes Grenzfurthner.
 Link Stewart Brand Meets The Cybernetic Counterculture: By Fred Turner.
 Intro: >>Brand worked off and on with USCO as a photographer and a technician between 1963 and 1966, living at the Garnerville church for short periods between his travels. Within USCO, he encountered the first stirrings of the New Communalist movement. Like Cage and Rauschenberg, the members of USCO created art intended to transform the audience's consciousness. They also drew on many diverse electronic technologies to achieve their effects. Strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters—for USCO, the products of the technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming their viewers" collective mind-set. So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana and peyote and, later, LSD offered members of USCO, including Brand, a chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness. And USCO's work did not stop at the end of each performance. Gathering at their church in Garnerville, and then again at performance sites around the country, the members of USCO lived and worked together steadily for a period of years. Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics.<< Link Albert C. Barnes: Cantankerous Freethinker: Tim Madigan ponders the mysteries of friendship. Quote: >>The philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952) was by all accounts a lovable, gentle and self-effacing man, who seldom made enemies and almost always sought a compromise between opposing points of view. And yet, surprisingly, for over 30 years he was a close friend to a man who was by all accounts unlovable, pugnacious and self-aggrandizing, with a penchant for making enemies out of most everyone he met, and a reputation for never compromising even in the face of overwhelming evidence against his position. How could it be that Dewey could remain close to this outrageous individual? Dewey's other close associates were befuddled by this friendship. Sidney Hook, for instance, wrote in 1952, shortly after Dewey's death, that "Dewey's goodness was so genuine, constant, and sustained, even under provocation, that I sometimes found it somewhat oppressive. It was almost a relief that I discovered one shortcoming in him. That was his indulgent friendship with Albert C. Barnes."<<
Link The Top Pickers vs. the Pack: Sites Want Users to Buy Into the 'Genius' Factor. Quote: "For the past decade, much of the Internet has been animated by the 'wisdom of crowds,' the notion that the tremendous masses drawn to the Web can together provide collective knowledge that outperforms even that of experts. By marshaling the knowledge and tastes of millions of people, the Web has fundamentally changed the way people can gain knowledge about their world."
Link monochrom roleplaying // monochrom's "Campaign" #2 Pictures: Pictures of the second episode of "Campaign", monochrom's RPG project @ Volkstheater. Guests: Gerlinde Lang and Alfred Dorfer.
 Link Barcode of Life: The Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) is an international initiative devoted to developing DNA barcoding as a global standard in taxonomy. CBOL has more than 130 Member Organizations from 40 countries. (Thanx, Peter Hauser!)
Link Salome in Lowland: Brilliant 8-bit adaption of the opera "Salome" by filmmaker Christian Zagler.
 Link House Attack: Artist Erwin Wurm's wants "to criticize urban sprawl".
 (Museum Of Modern Art, Vienna) Link monochrom & Shifz presentation // Roböxotica @ HAIP 06: monochrom members Anika Kronberger and Daniely Fabry are currently at HAIP 06 festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The present the basic idea of Roböxotica, first and, inevitably, leading festival concerned with cocktail-robotics. Roböxotica is an annual cooperation between monochrom and Shifz.
 Two cocktail robots (Franky Ablinger's "Gesundheit" and Daniel and Anika's "Prost") are on display in Ljubljana. Link The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
 ANDREA BELFI - between neck & stomach (Häpna) DEPTH AFFECT - john cassettes (autres directions) FOURCOLOR - letter of sound (12k) HERMANO - the sweet and easy of brief happiness (Suburban) "The top of what you ask? The height of World of Warcraft greatness": Quote: "A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine quit playing Warcraft. He was a council member on what is now one of the oldest guilds in the world, the type of position coveted by many of the 7 million people who play the game today, but which only a few ever get. When he quit, I asked him if he would write a guest blog post about the experience. What follows is a cautionary tale about the pull an escape from reality can have on you." (Thanx, Teemu Schaabl)
Link USA, now they are 300,000,000: Quote: "America's rising population will solve more problems than it creates." Really?
Link 'DNA computer' is unbeatable at tic-tac-toe: A computer that uses strands of DNA to perform calculations has mastered the simple game – the work may one day boost DNA sample analysis.
Link Deal takes Microsoft further into Google territory: Quote: "Microsoft's strategic shift into Google territory took another step forward today with the announcement that the software giant has signed a digitisation agreement with a digital scanning specialist, Kirtas Technologies. The deal ... will enable Microsoft to forge ahead with its Live Book Search portal.... Its Live Book Search portal, to be launched early next year, will make available two strands of material: out-of-copyright scholarly material from educational establishments, and in-copyright books that are sent to Microsoft by publishers or authors and which are scanned by the company free of charge."
Link StrangeBanana: Quote: "StrangeBanana is a generator that automatically creates graphic webpage designs. You can see StrangeBanana at work by going to the StrangeBanana Style Generator page. What you see there will be a unique webpage design which have never been seen by anyone else before. If you want to, you can use that design for your own website."
Link Gravity Simulator:
 Quote: >>Gravity Simulator provides amateur astronomers with a powerful numerical integration tool. By performing n-body simulations, you can study the orbits of planets, moons, asteroids, or any object in the universe. You can recreate simulations performed by professional astronomers, or experiment with simulations of your own creation. Using Gravity Simulator's rotating frame feature, you can easily study the complex orbital relationship between the various moons of Saturn, or the relationship between Earth's orbit, and the horseshoe orbit of Cruithne, an asteroid often referred to as "Earth's 2nd moon". You can run the numerous simulations that come with Gravity Simulator, and additional ones available on this web site. Once you are comfortable with the existing simulations, you'll probably want to create some of your own. Gravity Simulator allows you to study the universe in a whole new way.<< (Win Software) Link Understanding The Gross-out Movie Phenomenon: Quote: "American males under 25 are the world's most lucrative filmgoing demographic. With its ready stream of sight gags to plaster on trailers and posters, this is not a hard genre to market; the less sophisticated the movie, the better. But does grosser necessarily mean funnier?"
Link Beginning of Doom for Russia Starts in 2014: According to a prophetess and a shaman of the seventh generation who is well-known in the area, Russia will face a series of large-scale catastrophes in 2014 because the mummy of princess Ochy-Bala had been recently unearthed. Well...
Link Even black-and-white bananas look yellow: Experiment reveals how expectation interferes with perception.
Link Roy Harris: The Semantics of Science: In The Semantics of Science Roy Harris challenges a number of long-accepted assumptions about science and scientific discourse. According to Harris, science - like art, religion and history - is one of the supercategories adopted by modern societies for explaining and justifying certain types of human activity. Harris argues that these supercategories are themselves verbal constructs, and thus language-dependent. Each supercategory has its own semantics. The function of the supercategory is to integrate what would otherwise be unconnected forms of inquiry, and the result of such integrations is to draw a certain map of our intellectual world.
 Link 1 Link 2 US: world empire of chaos: The US mourns its dead, the resistance groups celebrate theirs. The US seems not to understand that its current global war on terrorism is an asymmetrical war, and that the last military superpower is losing its engagements. The resistance in occupied and bombarded lands can still claim victory when the US fails to impose its will.
Link Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: A new study published in the respected medical journal "Lancet", recounts and revises the death toll in post-invasion Iraq (via histologion).
Link (PDF) Scientists Make Atomic Clock Breakthrough: Andrei Derevianko, Kyle Beloy, and Ulyana Safronova sat down six months ago and began work on a calculation that will help the world keep better time. In competition with scientists at the University of New South Wales, the University team led by associate professor Derevianko conducted research that increased the accuracy of atomic clocks, and they did it without running a single experiment.
Link The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
ANTONIUS BLOCK - I dated the devil BALLROOMS OF MARS - cédre (Nexsound) ANDERS DAHL - hundloka, flokblomstriga 1 (Häpna) EARLY DAY MINERS - offshore (secretly canadian) ANDREY KIRITCHENKO - stuffed with/out (nexsound) STEPHANE MATHIEU & JANEK SCHAEFER - hidden name (cronica) Georg Cracked talks to Howard Stelzer about record collecting tales of obession, woe and joy, more information and some funny stories all about the best round thing on earth, records. And collecting them.
LINK
Nanotechnology To Stop Weaponized Anthrax In Its Tracks: Clemson University chemist Ya-Ping Sun and his research team have developed a countermeasure strategy to weaponized anthrax.
Link Bucharest Stencil Street Art Collection: Awesome stuff from Romania's capital.
 Thanx, Vlad Nanca! Link monochrom live show // Taugshow #7! 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: Ryosuke Tei: Ryosuke Tei is the Creative Director of Furi Furi Company. Tei-san founded Furi Furi Company in 1998, and is the creator of Girls Power Manifest and the Bash figure series, as well as the innovative RPG Giftpia for the Nintendo Gamecube in Japan. He is considered to be one of Japan's most important figures in the character and game design scene. AniNite Special: The AniNite is the largest festival of Japanese pop culture held in Austria. AniNite members Silvia Groniewicz and Richard Pyrker will tell us about the AniNite concept and Aya and Schu, two female Cosplayers talk about their obsession and will present their newest creation. David Dempsey: David Dempsey is an ADDled informationmaniac who has replaced his mostly dysfunctional long-term memory with the web and small electronic thingies. Await his report. A video message comes to us from Eddie Codel inside the infamous Hat Factory in San Francisco, Kalifornia, Untied States of Ameerika. Regular guest Evelyn Fürlinger's topic is "Semantics, Syllables, and Sounds" -- and our showband consists of Peter Natterer and Ingmar Versolmann. Yeah! And lots of more.  [taugen; Viennese slang: to dig/love/adore something] Location: dietheater, Konzerthaus, Vienna. October 11, 2006. 8:30 PM. In English language. Link An Elephant Crackup? All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created.
Link monochrom video bit // Taugshow @ RepRap: Simon McAuliffe put Vik Olliver's interview from Taugshow #6 on their archive page. Quote:
monochrom have a TV show that had an interview with Vik talking about RepRap. An excerpt of the show discussing RepRap can be downloaded in MPEG format (31MB download) or WMV format (23MB download -- higher quality). The full show is both bizarre and entertaining and is available on their web site.RepRap Press Archive E-mail is for old people: College officials around the country find that a growing number of students are missing important messages about deadlines, class cancellations, and events sent to them by e-mail because, well, the messages are sent to them by e-mail. In response, some institutions require that students check their college e-mail accounts so they do not miss announcements, holding students responsible for official information that comes through that medium. Other institutions are attempting to figure out what technology students are using to try to reach them there.
Link
Cultural Noise: Noise as a Musical Metaphor for Contemporary Aesthetics in Popular Culture: Noise can be considered not only as a disturbing distortion but also as the maximum compression of information within a certain framework of space and time.
Abstract: >>Noise can be considered not only as a disturbing distortion but also as the maximum compression of information within a certain framework of space and time. The question of how to "audio-picture" modern life's necessities of an industrialized environment seems to be a highly relevant topic for artistic articulations in the last hundred years. Since the Industrial Revolution these articulations had not been "up to date" until Noise emerged and made reproduction as its paradigmatic core (Walter Benjamin) understandable for an audiovisual context. Due to its repetition ad infinitum Noise constantly produces its own hermetical simulacrum and generates an overload information unit. As a (post-)modern phenomenon, Noise has become one of the most referred interdisciplinary discourses in many branches of Art and everyday life. Noise rejects the traditional influences of the spectacle, occupies the body via a set of techno-mediated waves as a field of battle/discourse, establishes sonic warfare against mediocre pop-practices, institutionalises its subjective politics and appears as an extremely lo-fi articulation. "Noise is with us all the time and it symbolizes a world that is forever expanding and accelerating. [...] Noise foreshadows and foretells. It alters." (Robert Worby).<< Link Christie's Star Trek Auction: Well, success at least for Christie's and Paramount--not so for working joes like me who didn't have $5,500 to spend on a set of "genuine" Klingon bat'leth swords. On the 40th anniversary of the orginal Star Trek series, Paramount Pictures, the owner of the franchise, has decided to sell off the props, costumes and models from all the series and the movies through Christie's in New York City. The auction house has 1,000 lots to sell off today through October 7--and based on the first day's efforts, it greatly underestimated what some people are willing to pay.
Link The City of God and the Global City: Quote: >>Augustine's famous distinction between the City of God and the City of Man has been re-worked in many ways. George Bush and Tony Blair certainly are not the only ones to think that we are caught up in a global struggle between good and evil, or to suppose that this transcendent struggle is immanent in everyday life. Nor is such thinking confined to the religiously minded. Since the eighteenth century, the great secular ideologists of modernity -- liberal and socialist, progressive and conservative, anarchist and statist, humanist and post-humanist -- have posed the most urgent problems within an Augustinian frame. They tell us that there is an immanent, widely suppressed, but potentially transcendent "good," faced with an omnipresent evil that can somehow be overcome or contained by those who commit themselves to the struggle against it. Apocalyptic in tone, universalistic in aspiration, reductionist in analysis, often violent in practice, this onto-theological politics gathers us all in from time to time. Those reared in the monotheistic cultures of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam may be particularly vulnerable to the appeal of such a politics, but there are many signs that people from other cultural backgrounds feel the pull of it as well.[2] In this context, it is particularly important to explore other ways of thinking, which are not so apocalyptic, universalistic, reductionist, or violent. There is no easy way of escaping Augustine's clutches, but his grip can be loosened.<<
Link Study Spots the Brain's Selfishness 'Off-Switch': Experiments involving a "fairness" game show that the right side of this region -- called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex -- helps people suppress selfish urges in obviously unjust situations, even at their own expense. When researchers used a mild electric current to temporarily short-circuit this area, the law of the jungle quickly reasserted itself.
Link Iraq's diverse Shia: It takes more than religion to form a homogeneous whole at a regional or national level as demonstrated by the internal divisions within Iraq's Shia community. Their loyalties are unpredictable.
Link Hubble Finds Extrasolar Planets Far Across Galaxy: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a variety of distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.
Link monochrom info bit // Mark Allen/Machine Project: We are featured in Mark Allen's IM-nterview about his wonderful LA-based "Machine Project".
Link Budapest 1956: Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech denouncing Stalin had set the stage. Fifty years ago this month, Hungary rose in revolution... (Commentary by Arch Puddington.)
Link Nothing Is Sacred, as Looters Rob Mexican Churches of Colonial Treasures: Mexican churches have suffered a wave of art robberies. "Looters have picked through Latin America's archaeological sites for centuries. These church robberies are newer, arising as the taste for colonial religious art has grown in the international art market. Every country in the region has experienced thefts, but the scale is larger in Mexico because of the country’s wealth of colonial art."
Link Hitchcock as Philosopher by Robert J Yanal: Mark Huston looks at Robert Yanal looking at Hitchcock directing philosophy.
Link The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
Fat Cat Package: ENSEMBLE - s/t(Fat Cat) MAX RICHTER - songs from before SONGS OF GREEN PHEASANT - aerial days (Fat Cat) and then: WOLF EYES - human animal (Sub Pop) Crates and Barrels: Wonderful collection of crates and barrels in videogames.
 And there's even a screenshot of SUZ. Link 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".
 Link RNAi scoops medical Nobel: Gene silencers get something to shout about. Quote: "Two US geneticists who discovered one of the fundamental mechanisms by which gene expression is controlled have received a Nobel prize for their achievement. Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, who revealed the process of RNA interference (RNAi) in 1998, will share the US$1.4-million award."
Link qoolsqool: DaddyD writes: "qoolsqool is one of those sites where users can post content, vote on other peoples submissions and just generally participate. Sort of like some of those news sites that seem to be so popular these days. The thing is, you won't find any news here, no pictures of peoples cats, and as far as I can tell no teenagers lip-syncing tacky pop songs. What you will find is a collection of educational materials. From baking skils to quatum physics, they promise to provide some of the best free educational materials available on the net. It's geared toward teachers, students and self-learners, and it has me pretty excited. I haven't had a chance to test the quality of the materials yet, since I just found the site this morning, but the idea alone is enough to make it worth checking out."
Link Diana: Mystery of 12 Men in the Shadows: Were there "Men in Black" present at the death of Princess Di? Uh yeah!
Link The Two Cultures And The Real World: Paper by Lui Lam (Department of Physics, San Jose State University). Abstract: >>The "two cultures" refer to the scientific culture and the literary culture, pointed out by C.P. Snow in the 1950s. The former derives from the study of material systems from the natural sciences, while the latter comes from the understanding of humans. However, humans are Homo sapiens--a (biological) material system, and are thus a part of the natural sciences since the latter is the study of all material systems. Consequently, science and the humanities are unified at the fundamental level--they are all "science matters". The apparent "gap" comes from the different levels of scientific development, the deficiency in the school curricula, and the unfortunate misconception reinforced by current science communications. To help close this gap, a general-education course--The Real World--was introduced and taught by the author at SJSU. In the beginning, the students divided themselves into three groups; each group has a focused topic. Each group tried to find out the current status and the frontier in the scientific study of the chosen topic--through books, the Web and interviewing of experts. Concurrently, the instructor gave lectures on complex systems--on fractals, chaos, power-law phenomena, and active walks. These topics can link up science and the humanities. By pointing out the common themes and unifying principles, the merging of humanities with science could be achieved.<<
Link flickr/moo: This is really nice...turn your flickr-photos into business-cards, or perhaps into flyers or small postcards....anything! I haven't tried it yet but probably will quite soon. It seems easy to do and looks pretty slick..
Link Jesus image found in dog's butt: If you have faith you will see Him.
 (Thanx, rumpstipumsti) Source Link Social History of the Pineapple:
 Quote: "The Pineapple has served as both a food and a symbol throughout the human history of the Americas. Originally unique to the Western Hemisphere, the fruit was a culinary favorite of the fierce Carib Indians who lived on islands in the sea that still bears their name." (Via thenonist) Link Shark slaughter shock: At least four times as many sharks are killed for their fins as are reported in official figures.
Link Abu Ghraib Art? (No Takers): Quote: "Colombian artist Fernando Botero is offering some 80 paintings and drawings portraying the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison to any suitable museum willing to display them." So far -- no takers.
Link [The Archives] 
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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] 
[ P r o j e c t s ] Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 2 / The Adventure Game 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) International Year of Polytheism 2007 Santa Claus Vs. Christkindl: A Mobster Battle 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 Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 1 / The Adventure Game I was a copyright infringement in a previous life (T-Shirt) Firing Squad Euro2008 Intervention I can count every star in the heavens above -- The image of computers in popular music All Tomorrow's Condensations / Puppet show The Redro Loitzl Story / Short film Law and Second Order (T-Shirt) They really kicked you out of the Situationist International? When I was asked to write about new economy Arse Elektronika 2007, 2008, 2009 etc. The Void's Foaming Ebb / Short film The Charcoal Burner / Short film Fieldrecording in Sankt Wechselberg / Short film Campaign For The Abolition Of Personal Pronouns Entertainment (Unterhaltung) / Short film Nicholas Negroponte Memorial Cable Experience the Experience! (West Coast USA/Canada Tour 2005) A Holiday in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Metroblogging Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere 452 x 157 cm² global durability Blattoptera / Art for Cockroaches An attempt to emulate an attempt The Department for Criticism against Globalisation Disney vs. Chrusov / Short film Turning Threshold Countries Into Plows Roböxotica // Festival for Cocktail-Robotics Cracked Foundation For The Fine Arts Oh my God, they use a history which repeats itself! (T-Shirt) Administrating:  . . . . . |
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