[ B l o g / / Archive]


Transgender Toilets 
There have been high profile cases on the matter of which toilets trans people should be able to use...
This link is to a short video, explaining why a school in Thailand introduced a toilet for those pupils who considered themselves transsexual. The pupil interviewed seems quite content with the set up.

A model to be replicated? Or a risk of further marginalisation?
Link



Toilets, Sheep Stables & Museums: World Building Of The Year Shortlist Announced 
A total of 224 projects from 43 countries have been nominated, including a fire station in Mexico, a public toilet in Texas, a women's health centre in Burkina Faso, a writer's retreat in Costa Rica, a sheep stable in the Netherlands, a private cemetery in Lebanon, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston – the first new museum to be built in the American city for 100 years.



Link



Hey Lisa, nice haircut! 

International Year Of Polytheism: Favorite Deity? 
monochrom content info
We are continuing our polytheistic series about 'Favorite Deities"... and we asked Richie Pettauer of Datenschmutz to write about his favorite god/dess. He can't really decide. And that's good!
[...] But even though it is easy for me to support the idea and to feel frighteningly in tune with the great polytheist movement, I'm having hell of a hard time answering the question about my favorite god/desse/s, since I worship countless of them. Some live in my flat, some I talk to on a regularly basis, some I had sexual intercourse with and some I have never seen nor even dared to imagine in their full glory. [...]
Read his full story here.

If you want to submit a story/review/interview about/with your favorite kind-of-supreme being/s, please don't hesitate! Email: polytheism AT monochrom.at!



International Year Of Polytheism: News 
monochrom content info
A never-ending struggle!
The "International Year Of Polytheism" (powered by monochrom) wants to overcome the epoch of the monotheistic worldviews (and its derivatives such as "The West" and "The Arab World") through the reconstruction of a polytheistic multiplicity in which countless gods and goddesses will eventually neutralize each other. Polytheism is democracy, Monotheism a dictatorship, even in its pseudo-secular form. Freed from the servitude of monotheism and the fraternal strife of the trinity, the world would be redeemed in a chaotic baptism of multiplicity.





News:
Massive polytheistic breakthrough
Polytheism goes Amish?



US Ambassador 



Spotted at Costa Rican airport.
Somewhere in the world there is this man from Louisville, Kentucky who travels the world wearing Micky Mouse ears. At airports he likes to give candy to children, pose for photos, and share travel tips. My favorite American.



Bill Gates: Philosophy not around much anymore 
Time warp to 2002. Leo Findeisen of TransformingFreedom spotted a gem of a quote... by Bill Gates:
"GPL software is like this thing called Linux, where you can never commercialize anything around it; that is, it always has to be free. And, you know, that's just a philosophy. Some said philosophy wasn't around much anymore, but it's still there. And so that's where we part company."
Philosophy. Not around much. Anymore. Oh wow.
Link



The Bush Knight 
'"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.'
Mystery novelist Andrew Klavan, "What Bush and Batman Have in Common," The Wall Street Journal.
Link



Paint That Can Prevent Plane Crashes 
Chemists created a paint embedded with pressure-sensitive capsules that contain a contrastingly colored dye. Violent scratches, dents, or strikes cause the capsules to burst. Visual inspections for changes in the color of the paint allow inspectors to pinpoint potentially damaged areas.
Link



Suicide on the Tube 
There are plenty of ways to commit suicide, but few more public than turning a multiton moving train full of passengers into a bullet. Last year in the U.K., 194 people killed themselves on the tracks of mass-transit systems, with some 50 of those choosing the sooty tunnels of the Tube. New York City's subway averages 26 suicides a year. In Paris, 24 died on the tracks of the Métro last year. While it is a fallacy to imagine any suicide as a solitary act — even the tidiest affair leaves survivors stricken — death by train is a particularly declaratory form of killing oneself. It makes the act a form of theater — for the driver, watching it all from behind his windshield, and for the rest of us.

In the past months in Britain, there has been a sort of low-humming cultural unease about suicides on the Tube, which are readily announced over station intercoms as the reason for delays, presumably to allay fears of terrorism. A movie in general release, Three and Out, attempted to turn this unease into dark comedy by portraying a hapless Tube driver who tries to exploit a (fictional) loophole in his contract that grants him early retirement if he witnesses three suicides from his train. The film misjudged the nation's mood and was savaged by film critics, mental-health workers and the train drivers' union, whose members picketed outside the premiere of the movie. Their placards declared that suicides on the Tube were no laughing matter.
Link



WebToSnailMail 
Tired of the rapid pace of the internet? This is your solution.

WebToSnailMail is a free service where you can receive web pages by regular postage. It's simple and very easy.

Just send a self addressed and stamped envelope with the URL of the desired web-page to:

WebToSnailMail
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

In 4-6 weeks you will be receiving the web page printed out in your envelope.
I think that's Google's snailmail address... do they plan to control snaimail and the web?
Link (thanx, Lichtenwagner)



The eyez have it 
Gene Siskel once said that the only way a human audience can relate to a nonhuman character is through the eyes. (From a review critical of the classic film "Free Willy")
Steven Spielberg gave his creature E.T. eyes based on those of Albert Einstein, Earnest Hemmingway, and a Himalayan Cat.



A UK artist has rediscovered this prinicpal as seen above.

Link



Google Counts More Than 1 Trillion Unique Web URLs 
Google announced that there are currently one trillion unique URLs on the web. Growing several billion pages per day...
Link (thanx, fra!)



Kamikaze: Is It A Japanese Term? 
Languagehat poses a really interesting question...
The Wikipedia entry for kamikaze says flatly that it was not the Japanese term. [...] I added a [citation needed] tag, but being too impatient to wait for some Wikipedian to notice and respond, I thought I'd ask you all: anybody know whether ordinary Japanese used the term kamikaze during the war or whether it was imported from ignorant Yanks afterwards?
Can you help answer it?
Link



Men on a slippery slide in future hermaphrodite world 
Are men the new endangered species? According to a Melbourne bio-ethicist, they're way up there with pandas and polar bears.

In a speech titled Should human beings have sex?, Dr Robert Sparrow yesterday told the Australian Medical Students Association convention that females could soon rule the world as hermaphrodites without any biological use for men.

With the help of some frozen sperm at first, females could procreate on their own until stem-cell technology meant bone marrow and other human tissue could be converted into sperm, the senior lecturer at Monash University's Centre for Human Bioethics said.
Link



Proposal for DNA testing of Chopin's heart nixed 
Scientists want to remove the heart for DNA tests to see if Chopin actually died from cystic fibrosis and not tuberculosis as his death certificate stated. But the government says that's not a good reason to disturb the remains of a revered native son.
Link



A race between Microsoft and Intel 
"Second, there is a race — a race between Microsoft and Intel. Intel keeps making the CPUs faster and Microsoft keeps making the operating systems slower... and so far Intel is winning."
-- from Cisco® LAN Switching (CCIE Professional Development)
By Kennedy Clark / Cisco Press

Link (thanx, Adrian Dabrowski)



We Empathize, Therefore We Are: Toward A Moral Neuropolitics 
In his magisterial study, The Slave Ship, maritime historian Marcus Rediker has documented the role played by emotional and especially visual appeals in ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not unlike the structural violence endemic to global capitalism today, the abolitionist James Field Stanfield argued that the terrible truths of the slave trade "had been withheld from the public eye by every effort that interest, ingenuity, and influence, could devise" (Rediker, 2007, p. 133).

Therefore, "Stanfield appealed to the immediate, visceral experience of the slave ship, over and against abstract knowledge about the slave trade, as decisive to abolition ..." (p. 156). The abolitionist's most potent weapon was the dissemination of drawings of the slave ship Brooks. Rediker asserts that these images were "to be among the most effective propaganda any social movement has ever created" (p. 308).

Based on recent findings from neuroscience we can plausibly deduce that the mirror neurons of the viewer were engaged by these images of others suffering. The appeal was to the public's awakened sense of compassion and revulsion toward graphic depictions of the wholesale violence, barbarity, and torture routinely practiced on these Atlantic voyages. Rediker notes that the images would instantaneously "make the viewer identify and sympathize with the ‘injured Africans' on the lower deck of the ship ..." while also producing a sense of moral outrage (p. 315, Olson, 2008).

In our own day, the nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world's most eminent scientists, "What are you optimistic about? Why?" In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cited the proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are "wired for empathy." This is the aforementioned discovery of the mirror neuron system or MNS. The work shows that the same affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one's own pain and the pain of others.

Iacoboni's optimism is grounded in his belief that with the popularization of scientific insights, these findings in neuroscience will seep into public awareness and " ... this explicit level of understanding of our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us" (Iacoboni, 2007, p. 14). Whether or not this occurs, Iacoboni's prediction underscores the complex relationship between science and culture and social historian Margaret Jacob's insight that "No institution is safe if people simply stop believing in the assumptions that justify its existence" (Jacoby, 1987, p.). Iacoboni's recent book, Mirroring People (2008a) and interviews (2008b) as well as Rizzolati and Sinigaglia's Mirrors in the Brain (2008) promise to make this new work accessible to the lay public. In similar fashion, Steven Pinker concludes a recent piece on the science of morality with these challenging but hopeful words from Anton Chekov, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like" (Pinker, 2008). [...]
Link



WALL-E: embodiment of the marriage of Disney and Pixar? 
Brian Tiemann (Peeve Farm) writes:
"I don't know if they meant it this way all along or what, but WALL-E plays like a living, glowing embodiment of the marriage of Disney and Pixar, like their inaugural project. ... And on another level, one starts to wonder whether the concept of a love story between a hopelessly sexy and futuristic piece of technology and a decrepit but nostalgically lovable relic of the past might be meant to depict something more contemporary: the fusion of the barely-remembered legacy of Walt with the all-too-dominant ascendancy of the House of Steve."
Link (via metaphilm)



Mirrors and physics: the basics 
Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly, this half-size rule does not apply to the image of someone else moving about the room. If you sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches or moves away, the size of the person's image in the mirror will grow or shrink as our innate sense says it should.
Link



The US gas garrison: Energy self-sufficiency not military escorts for oil 
The Carter Doctrine, established 28 years ago, put the US military in service of assuring the nation’s regular supplies of imported oil. This has near-bankrupted the US and corrupted the military, yet left the US insecure in energy sources and globally loathed. The time has come to demote petroleum and stand down the troops.
Link



Hackerspaces.org 
Hackerspaces are community-operated physical places, where people can meet and work on their projects. Hackerspaces.org is for everyone who started or wants to start their own hackerspace. The site features:
* List of Hacker Spaces: Find a or start a Hackerspace near you!
* Communicate: Get in touch with Hackerspaces from all over the world!
* Documentation: Infos on running a space: Legal Structure, Location Scouting, Decision Making, ...
* Hackerspace Software: Billing, Membership Management, Calendaring, ...


Link



Experiment: The Hacker Anthem? 
monochrom content info
monochrom proudly presented a song at the HOPE Conference Closing Ceremony in New York City.
"Surfen Multimedia" is a German techno-trash-schlager by a group called "Eurocats" and was recorded in 1996. In 1996 this song was ahead of its time. But now we can introduce it as the new theme song of the global hacker movement. Spread the word.

Surfen Multimedia
Lyrics (translation):

Suring surfing through the world with multimedia
Suring surfing, day and night
on the data highway

Come join me on the internet tonight
I'm already waiting for you
Dude, be a user, go online
You'll meet me in the email

And should you lack some megabytes
You’ll find them here with me
Be it interface or cyberspace
I'll gladly share with you

With bits and bytes
With mouse and click
We are going on a tour
In the World Wide Web
We'll follow each new hint today
MP3 Link (part of our Lashcore collection)



monochrom's Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling @ HOPE Conference 
monochrom content info
Please take part in our Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling training camp @ HOPE Conference. Ongoing sessions on the 18th floor, elevator area.



You can find the ruleset on our page.
Link



monochrom in Philadelphia 
monochrom content info



Some blogs already mention it:
yvynyl
Hacktory



monochrom's Innermost Unifier / Corporate Anthems @ Last HOPE Conference, NYC 
monochrom content info
Johannes Grenzfurthner will present a talk/audio performance @ Last HOPE Conference. Friday, July 18, 10:00 PM / Hopper room.
The Innermost Unifier: Today it's the Corporate Anthem
A talk/audio performance by Johannes Grenzfurthner, monochrom (Vienna, Austria)

Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software-industry), Johannes Grenzfurthner gives a theoretical and applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate anthems.

Come and sing along. Powernapping is welcome, too.



Kiki and Bubu get wasted at Mashable party 
monochrom content info
They don't really like the tech business -- but they know how to party.
Kiki and Bubu crashed the superfancy Mashable party in San Francisco.



Write-up and nice photos by Brian Solis.
Link
And an interview snapshot.



Foo Camp 2008 featuring Kiki and Bubu 
monochrom content info
Scott Beale posted some excellent photos of Foo Camp 2008... and some of them feature our friends Kiki and Bubu.



Link



Reminder: monochrom Google talk 
monochrom content info
Johannes will visit the Google Campus and give a talk:

"Context Hacking: Some Examples Of How To Mess With Art, The Media System, Law And The Market"

July 14, 12 noon, Tunis ballroom, Google Campus, Mountain View, CA.



BBtv features "Kiki and Bubu and The Self" 
monochrom content info
Kiki and Bubu return. Boing Boing TV features the new episode of Kiki and Bubu.

Someone is crying! Maybe a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned or despised being? Kiki and Bubu want to go and see who it is...



Link (Boing Boing TV)
Link (Kiki and Bubu site)



"Kiki and Bubu and The Self" on YouTube 
monochrom content info
Someone is crying! Maybe a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned or despised being? Kiki and Bubu want to go and see who it is...



Link (YouTube)
Link (Kiki and Bubu site)



monochrom's "Kiki and Bubu and The Self" 
monochrom content info
Someone is crying! Maybe a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned or despised being? Kiki and Bubu want to go and see who it is...



Link (Kiki and Bubu site)



United and Mighty Soviet Jazz Rock Union 
My guest post about non-traditional versions of the Soviet national anthem... over at Laughing Squid.
Link



monochrom: upcoming US tour / dates 
monochrom content info
monochrom @ O'Reilly Foo Camp
Possible topics: Beautiful failure, Corporate Anthems, Massive Multiplayer Thumb Wrestling.
July 11-13, Sebastopol, CA

"Context Hacking: Some Examples Of How To Mess With Art, The Media System, Law And The Market"
July 14, 12 noon, Tunis ballroom, Google Campus, Mountain View, CA

monochrom @ Last Hope 2008
Talk about Corporate Anthems / Hopper room, 10 PM
July 18, Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City.

Law And Second Order: monochrom in Philadelphia
Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Studies
July 22, 8 PM

Law And Second Order: monochrom in Washington, DC
St Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church
(in the Sanctuary!)
1525 Newton St NW, Washington DC 20010
July 23, 8:30 PM



The End of Theory: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete? 
According to Chris Anderson, we are at "the end of science", that is, science as we know it." The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age."

"At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later."
Link
And there are tons of comments by folks like George Dyson, Kevin Kelly or Bruce Sterling.
Link / Reactions



Food Crisis, Which Crisis? 
This June the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) held an emergency summit in Rome that focused on the current global food crisis. However, rejuvenating and protecting agriculturalists did not seem to be on the agenda.
And a battle it certainly is. There are basically two sides, offering two versions of "crisis." What version of crisis we accept is crucial to formulating policies to combat its effects. The fate of whole ecosystems and populations hinges on what drives higher commodity prices. Do we blame rising demand and tight supplies or the early effects of climate change? Or do we seek answers in the role that financial speculation, neoliberal restructuring, and biofuel cultivation play alongside those other factors? The first version, which serves the interests of the international finance institutions, is represented by developed nations such as the U.S. and the UK and their corporations. It focuses on the role that increased demand from China and India and tightened supplies has played in driving prices skywards. Meanwhile, farmers in Africa and elsewhere remain too unproductive, with dilapidated road systems, to get their produce to market. They are, in the lingo, in need of "modernization." Along with that, the leaders of the FAO and the World Bank agree, must come technological innovation. The language of the "new Green Revolution" is being mobilized with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the vanguard.

The second version comes from peasant organizations such as Via Campesina and a clutch of eloquent NGOs, such as Practical Action, Food First, GRAIN, Movement for the Global South, and the World Development Movement. Its diagnosis of the current crisis is far deeper. Rather than being a short term rise in food and oil prices, this version tends to see the crisis as rooted in the longer-term neoliberal project. Food prices in poor countries have been allowed to rocket by a neoliberal system where government-run distribution networks are dismantled, grain stores abandoned, large corporations dictate prices, and indebted nations and farmers convert crops for export to earn prized foreign currency.
Link



Pangaea: Pac-Man supercontinent ate itself to pieces 
The reason you are sitting where you are right now may be because Pangaea, the most recent supercontinent to gather together all the world's landmasses together, ate itself nearly 300 million years ago. Convection in the Earth's mantle shifts the floating continental plates around, eventually driving them together into supercontinents every few hundred million years. We know supercontinents eventually break up again, but it is not clear how they do this.
Link



Is the Web still the Web? 
For developers of RIAs (rich Internet applications), Adobe's announcement that Google and Yahoo will soon be able to index text within Flash movies should come as welcome news. Until now, Flash files have been black boxes; as binary files, search indexers could no more extract textual information from them than from JPEGs or PNGs. This first stab at Flash search still sounds somewhat primitive, but it raises an issue of importance to all Internet application developers. Given the growing number of data types and file formats being transmitted over HTTP and the increasing complexity of the applications that make use of them, is today's Web really still the Web? Or is it morphing into something else? How can we ensure that today's Web apps offer enough capabilities and flexibility to make Web 2.0 worthy of its name?
Link (via Franz Ablinger, bagasch)



Solidarity Divided: Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice 
"Solidarity Divided" by Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin.



The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice.

A new direction for labor by two of its leading activist intellectuals.
"Solidarity Divided" is an attempt to provide a framework for activists who, in looking at the US trade union movement, are trying to figure out the origin and nature of the current crisis. It is NOT an attempt to examine every question relative to the development of the US working class, nor is it an exhaustive examination of each reform effort. It is particularly focused on efforts that began around 1995 with the coming to power of the John Sweeney administration in the AFL-CIO. The book additionally attempts to situate the current crisis within the context of the failures of a certain approach to unionism that is grounded in the thought and practice of Samuel Gompers, later amended with virulent anti-communism.
Link / Interview
Link / Book



First Measurements Of The Solar Wind Termination Shock By Voyager 2 Spacecraft 
Two University of Iowa space physicists report that the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which has been traveling outward from the Sun for 31 years, has made the first direct observations of the solar wind termination shock, according to a paper published in the July 3 issue of the journal Nature.



Link



Brasilia: A Vision in Concrete 
It was a heroic and inhuman scheme. From 1956 to 1960, Brazil—in an effort to cleanse itself of its colonial past, to flee its burgeoning social afflictions, and to fulfill its long-prophesied emergence as a great power—conjured a new capital, Brasília, on an empty plateau in an endless savanna 3,500 feet above sea level. The city's planner, the architect Lúcio Costa, found the setting "excessively vast ... out of scale, like an ocean, with immense clouds moving over it." No invented city could accommodate itself to this wilderness. Instead, Costa declared, Brasília would create its own landscape: he devised a city on a scale as daunting as the setting itself. In conformity not with its environment but with those modernist utopian theories of the rational, sterile "Radiant City," Brasília was not to grow organically but to be born, Costa said, "as if she had been fully grown"—he even refused to visit the site, because he didn't want reality to impinge on the purity of the original design. Brasília was the first place built to be approached by jet, and the city's roads—inspired by Robert Moses's deadening expressways belting New York's outer boroughs—were like runways.
Link



Vienna: Sculpture Mob in Training 
monochrom content info
Successful administration of several Sculpture Mob training sessions in Vienna. First pictures online. More to come.



Link



Philosophical Insults 


(Click to enlarge)

Via Feminist Philosophers



A 300-pound American contains the energy equivalent in fat of roughly 15 gallons of gasoline 
Oh my.
It's one of the last untapped energy sources, and one in which the United States leads the world. It's not just renewable, but almost impossible to get rid of. We're talking about fat. At about 3,500 calories to the pound, a 300-pound American contains the energy equivalent in fat of roughly 15 gallons of gasoline. How long will we let this resource go unused?
Link



Wikileaks Plans to Save Journalism... and the World? 
When online troublemaker Julian Assange co-founded Wikileaks, the net's premiere document-leaking site last year, some were skeptical that the service would produce anything of interest.

Now, after 18 months of publishing government, industry and military secrets that have sparked international scandals, led to takedown threats and briefly gotten the site banned in the United States, Assange says Wikileaks is just getting started changing the world.
Link



Bachelorhood And Its Discontents 
Nice piece. And it opens with a nice quote.
Leibniz never married. He had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married. — Bernard Fontenelle
Link (via Feuerfisch)



Sculpture Mobs: Training Camp Vienna 
monochrom content info
It is time for SCULPTURE MOBS!

monochrom offers free courses, in-depth training and invites people on a couple of guerrilla field trips.



When? Where? July 5 (12 noon-3 PM), main courtyard of Museumsquartier Vienna!

Offical website



At last, a ban on cluster bombs 
"War scrap is a resource like wood or bamboo"

By Angela Robson
More than 100 countries, gathered in Dublin, agreed on 28 May to ban cluster bombs in what campaigners called the most significant disarmament treaty for a decade. The signatories, who agreed the text for the treaty to be signed in Oslo in December, include some of Europe's biggest traditional users and stockpilers of the weapons, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Some of the world's main producers and stockpilers – including the United States, Russia and China – oppose the move to ban cluster munitions. A statement from the US, which boycotted the Dublin conference, said: "While the United States shares the humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin, cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility, and their elimination from US stockpiles would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk."
Link



Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom 
Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.
Link



RepRap printer printed its child 
Milestone achieve by Adrian and Vik of the RepRap community, they've replicated entirely a Darwin machine, and this child is beginning to print itself another printer!
Adrian (left) and Vik (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.
Link



"Carefully Selected Moments" on Napster 
monochrom content info
You now can buy our monochrom semi-best-of "Carefully Selected Moments" on Napster.



Link



"Der Streichelnazi" on YouTube 
monochrom content info



Link (YouTube)
Link (Streichelnazi homepage)



Make Your Concrete Jungle Slightly More Jungular 
Frankly, they had me at "Subversive":



Disperse organic joy via your very bicycle! The Bloom Device attaches to your frame and spreads seeds through happy vegetable-based bubble vehicles.

Sow the literal seeds of building-toppling change! Choose flowers that smell nice! Make oblique James Joyce references and confuse passersby!
Link



"Der Streichelnazi" on Boing Boing TV 
monochrom content info


Link (BBtv)
Link (Streichelnazi homepage)



monochrom: Der Streichelnazi / Nazi Petting Zoo 
monochrom content info
In 1938 Austria joined the Third Reich. Millions cheered Hitler and in the referendum 99.75% said 'yes' to 'Greater Germany'. But after World War II, many Austrians sought comfort in the idea of Austria as "the Nazis' first victim". Factions of Austrian society tried for a long time to advance the view that it was only annexation at the point of a bayonet(te). But it's time to embrace history. It's time to remember the feel-good days of 1938. It's time to let our real feelings out! It's time to hug the Nazi, Austria! Finally!



Link



Hookworms suppress human immune response (but that's a good thing) 
"While carrying out field work in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s, David Pritchard noticed that Papuans infected with the Necator americanus hookworm, a parasite that lives in the human gut, did not suffer much from an assortment of autoimmune-related illnesses, including hay fever and asthma. Over the years, Dr. Pritchard has developed a theory to explain the phenomenon."

In order to get approval from Britain's National Health Services to test his theory on humans, Pritchard infected himself with hookworms. Now he's recruiting participants for a clinical trial to see if hookworm infection will help reduce asthma and allergy symptoms.

Link



The Environmental Impact of Corn-Based Plastics 
How does corn-based plastic stand up against its petroleum based counterpart?
Polylactic acid (PLA), a plastic substitute made from fermented plant starch (usually corn) is quickly becoming a popular alternative to traditional petroleum-based plastics. As more and more countries and states follow the lead of China, Ireland, South Africa, Uganda and San Francisco in banning plastic grocery bags responsible for so much so-called "white pollution" around the world, PLA is poised to play a big role as a viable, biodegradable replacement.
Link



Is Google making us dumb? 
Is John Naughton right or is it just plain old cultural pessimism?
Link



Zombie Krocha: more pics 
monochrom content info
More Flickr pics...



Link



Call for participation: 25C3 
The 25th Chaos Communication Congress (25C3) is the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Berlin, Germany. First held in 1984, it since has established itself as "the European Hacker Conference", attracting a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists, and utopists from all around the world.
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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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