[ B l o g / / Archive]


monochrom's "Kiki and Bubu and The Feelings" 
monochrom content info
Kiki and Bubu like Christmas. But they hate the System. What can they do? They need some music!



Link to Video Link Audio (last.fm, iTunes)



Alien Abductions and Mental Hygiene Films: A Possible Link 
A well-known alleged paranormal phenomenon is the alien abduction popularized by books such as Communion: A True Story (Strieber 1988) and Intruders (Hopkins 1987). The stereotypical abduction begins with the sleeping human participant being awakened by an entity. Sometimes the human/entity encounter is confined to the bedroom; other times, the entity conveys the human to another location and later returns the human to his bedroom. During the encounter, the entity either imparts arcane knowledge to the human or performs pseudo-medical procedures upon him. When this extraordinary encounter is over, the human paradoxically resumes sleeping. This paradoxical resumption of sleep suggests that the encounter is a hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucination (those experienced during the transitional state between sleep and wakefulness) devoid of any objective reality (Klass 1989).

It is entertaining to speculate on possible inspirations for the hallucinations. A cultural background shared by millions may provide the source material for this brand of hallucination—the shared experience of watching mental hygiene films: short classroom films, dating between 1945 and 1970, “deliberately made to adjust the social behavior of their viewers” (Smith 1999). Mental hygiene films typically focus on how to attain social acceptance along with exhortations to avoid premarital sex, illegal drugs, and careless driving. Curiously, the motifs of several of these films resemble an alien abduction or a hypnopompic/hypnogogic hallucination. [...]
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NGOs and the victim industry 
Is a victim the subject of aid or the object? Most people see themselves as individuals dealing with a crisis. It's the outside world that sees them as victims.
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Becoming Screen Literate 
Kevin Kelly:
Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.
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You Do the Bath 
From ancient Pompeiian baths to modern Swiss spas, there’s always been something dirty about getting clean.
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Harnessing Light To Drive Nanomachines 
Science fiction writers have long envisioned sailing a spacecraft by the optical force of the sun's light. But, the forces of sunlight are too weak to fill even the oversized sails that have been tried. Now a team led by researchers at the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science has shown that the force of light indeed can be harnessed to drive machines — when the process is scaled to nano-proportions.
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Fabled days 
I am disturbed by this photo of a Mumbai hotel gunman. I find myself longing for the fabled days when villains did not look like people I might hang out with.



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Prestige Dialects 
In this video Snoop Dogg gives Martha Stewart a classic lesson in Prestige Dialects. From Wikipedia:
"A prestige dialect is the dialect spoken by the most prestigious people in a speech community which is large enough to sustain more than one dialect."
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Should Mumia Abu-Jamal receive a new trial? 
Philly.com asks: Should Mumia Abu-Jamal receive a new trial?
And I guess we should let them know...
Link (article)
Link (poll)



Between Imperial Client and Useful Enemy: Pakistan's Permanent Crisis 
By Justin Podur.
Pakistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the class and ideological composition of the military and its supremacy over civil society.1 Other sectors, such as the bureaucracy, feudal landlords and the small entrepreneurial class, were weak and subordinate. Opposition parties, meanwhile, were 'given more to hyperbole and public meetings than to organizing and resisting. A large part of the opposition is either ideologically reactionary or indistinguishable from the party in power.' A police state would use either a kind of developmental-fascist ideology (as happened in Chile, Brazil and Greece) or it would rely on religious fundamentalism, and would find an eager sponsor in the United States. 'Unfortunately,' the article concludes, 'the democratic and revolutionary groups in Pakistan to whom falls the responsibility of halting this trend are as yet only weakly developed.'

The main elements of Eqbal Ahmed’s analysis remain valid today. The military has become even stronger relative to civil society, opposing social forces weaker and divided, with democratic and revolutionary groups only weakly developed. At the epicentre of the War on Terror, Pakistan's current predicament brings together the inability of the state to deliver development or justice to its people, an ambiguous imperial sponsor, all the economic woes of neoliberal capitalism, and the cooptation mechanisms of 'democracy promotion'. Despite an absence of legitimacy, organizational inefficacy, and shrinking capacity to respond to challenges from the USA or India, Pakistan’s military dictatorship survives because it is stronger than civil society and political alternatives to it have been destroyed. The strength of the regime is based on the absence of feasible alternatives.
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Another Large-Scale Brain Simulation 
On the heels of the Blue Brain project, here's another effort to simulate neural systems on a very large scale, with the provocative title "Cognitive Computing via Synaptronics and Supercomputing."
From DARPA's announcement: “The end goal: ubiquitously deployed computers imbued with a new intelligence that can integrate information from a variety of sensors and sources, deal with ambiguity, respond in a context-dependent way, learn over time and carry out pattern recognition to solve difficult problems based on perception, action and cognition in complex, real-world environments... The end goal is inevitable, but is unpredictable."
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Food, Finance & Climate 
Industrialized agriculture and globalized food systems have been put forth as sources of cheap and abundant food. However, food is no longer cheap. The era of cheap food and cheap oil is over. The food crisis, mainly triggered by rising prices that emerged in 2007 and 2008 has led to food riots in many countries. From 2007 to 2008 the price of wheat increased by 130 per cent. The price of rice doubled during the first three months of 2008. Biofuels, speculation, destruction of local food economies, and climate change have all contributed to the rise in food prices. Climate change is aggravated by industrialized, globalized agriculture based on fossil fuels, and the resulting climate crisis in turn impacts food security in numerous ways, including intensified floods such as those Iowa experienced in 2008 and intensified and extended droughts like the one Australia witnessed in 2007. Globalization has also led to the destruction of local food economies and increased control by corporations like Monsanto and Cargill over our food systems. Global integration of agriculture in effect means global control over the world's food supply.
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Huge Buried Water Glaciers Discovered on Mars 
Giant glaciers buried under the surface of Mars at much lower latitudes than any previously known ice are a potential source of drinking water for future astronauts.

The discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, offers new possibilities in the search for life on the red planet.

"If there is life on Mars, this kind of ice would likely preserve ancient organisms and DNA," researcher Jim Head, a planetary geoscientist at Brown University, told Wired.com. "Examining the water ice could give you a good sample to try to detect if there had been life there."
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David Wiggins: The Solidarity at the Root of the Ethical 
Professor David Wiggins, the Wykeham Professor of Logic, Emeritus, at Oxford University gave a fantastic talk [...] at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar on "The Solidarity at the Root of the Ethical."
Link to podcast



Obama and his first language 
According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a president who speaks English as if it were his first language.

"Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."...
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Nuclear Moon Bases 
When lunar astronauts flick on their televisions after a long day of prospecting, they’ll have a trashcan-size nuclear reactor to thank for their nightly dose of prime time. NASA, looking past the already daunting task of simply getting humans to the moon by 2020, recently started considering proposals for ways to power lunar habitats. Batteries and fuel cells provide only short-term solutions. Solar power would be limited where a single night lasts as long as 354 hours. So space-agency officials have started making plans to go nuclear.
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Peter Campus messes with your head 
Three transitions (by Peter Campus, 1973):



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George W. Bush's nostrils always ran ahead of his mind 
With Jimmy Carter it was the teeth, big, straight and white as a set of country palings. With Richard Nixon it was the eyebrows, surely brooding on Hell. Abe Lincoln had the ears (and the beard, and the stove-pipe hat); Bill Clinton had a nose that glowed red, almost to luminousness, as his allergies assailed him. But George Bush's most extraordinary feature was his nostrils, and they will be missed.
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Greenland: Independence and Wealth and Suicide 
Greenland has rich deposits of oil, zinc, and diamonds. But will independence from Denmark do anything about its suicide rate?
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BBC1 and BBC2 TV To Stream Online 
From November 27, the channels can be viewed online via their respective sites on bbc.co.uk at the same time as they are broadcast on television. They will also be available to licence fee payers using the internet on portable devices such as mobile phones… The channels join BBC3, BBC4, CBBC, CBeebies and BBC News, which are already simulcast.
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Top 60 popular Japanese words/phrases of 2008 
Publishing company Jiyu Kokuminsha has released its annual list of the 60 most popular Japanese words and phrases of the year. This diverse collection of expressions highlights many of the events, trends and people that caught the attention of the Japanese mass media in 2008.

From this list, a panel of judges will select the trendiest Japanese word of 2008 (and 10 runners-up) and announce the results on December 1. The expressions are listed below in no particular order.
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The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park 
It's unfair to call the US auto industry dinosaurs, as some now do. It's certainly unfair to the dinosaurs. The 'Terrible Lizards' did not lay the basis for their own extinction or that of myriad other species. The original dinosaurs (who scientists now tell us were neither all that terrible nor lizards), were great examples of success and adaptation, good enough to rule the planet for 150 million years. The US auto industry is the opposite. It's not just that the Terrible Metal Lizards opposed fuel efficiency standards. Of course, they did. They also promoted gas-guzzling SUVs as a lifestyle must. They cranked out cars many did not want to buy. They wielded heavy clout in Congress, and were able to sponge off public funds in the name of saving jobs as they have yet again. Having received $ 25 billion earlier, their hats are in their outstretched hands again.

But that's the easy part. There's a lot more they did, as a major sector of industry - and as part of the larger corporate world of the United States. Over decades, they destroyed both existing and potential public transport. The 'American Dream' so far as the automobile went, was an imposed nightmare. In Detroit itself, you can see the skeletons of a once-alive transport system. All across the country, for decades from the 1920s, they bought up public transport systems and shut them down.
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Track the Space Toolbag 
A US astronaut lost her toolbag in space. But we know where it is.
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Long-lost 'Furby-like' Primate Discovered In Indonesia 
Furby, real.
A team led by a Texas A&M University anthropologist has discovered a group of primates not seen alive in 85 years. The pygmy tarsiers, furry Furby-like, or gremlin-looking, creatures about the size of a small mouse and weighing less than two ounces, have not been observed since they were last collected for a museum in 1921.


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Frozen Scandal 
Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.
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Oldest Arabic inspriction isn't much more than graffiti 
Ghabban now believes Muhammad's close associates and early followers "stripped Qur'ans of diacritical marks" in order to permit "Muslims to read the Qur'an as it was revealed to Muhammad in the various dialects of the Arabs, and allowing the skeleton of the word to bear all the meanings which appear in it."

Hoyland added that, "this would mean that Western scholars would have less excuse to change the text as we have it now."

Without diacritical marks, for example, a sentence such as, "I took with my whole hands," can also be interpreted as, "I took with my fingertips."

The first known Islamic inscription, whose carver might have made his own mark while walking down a Syrian pilgrimage road, may solve yet another Arabic history mystery: When did noted Islamic leader Umar ibn al-Khattab die?

According to tradition and other historical accounts, a Persian soldier assassin stabbed Umar in public as the caliph was leading prayers in a mosque. Zuhayr, who may have witnessed the violent crime, recorded that Umar died in "four and twenty," which means 644 A.D.
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Brain Control 
Your brain will be controlled. Try it.



"Odd" Baby Play = Autism? 
A recent study published by the UC Davis MIND Institute has found that infants who repetitively play with toys by spinning them or rattling them or who look at objects out of the corners of their eyes at one year of age are more likely than those who don't to be diagnosed with autism, says the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

What is troubling is not the finding itself, but the idea that these results might encourage parents to become hyper-vigilant about their infant's play behaviors, perhaps even to the point of unnecessary worry for the parents. Moreover, at one year of age, there do not exist the treatment interventions to begin caring for autistic children or those on the spectrum in the same way for those with later diagnoses. Adding a screening test of this kind at this point--without having established that there are effective treatment modalities for children diagnosed at this age--would unnecessarily worry parents and provide them with no viable treatment options.
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What's to be done about the Auto Industry? 
The U.S. Congress will vote this week on what to do about the America's Big Three automakers -- Chrysler, Ford and GM. GM teeters on the brink of bankruptcy and is screaming for help. The Bush administration does not want to give more than the $25 billion it has already promised to develop more fuel-efficient cars. Democrats want to take another $25 billion from the $700 billion financial bailout program and use that as a bridge loan to the auto industry. That would be a $50 billion dollar bailout for auto. The Big Three and the United Auto Workers (UAW) are lobbying together for the bailout and Congress is to vote on this next week.

This will be a decision about the government's commitment to working class communities, its concern about the future of transportation in America, and its awareness of the ecological disaster that confronts us. We should ask how our tax money might be best used in this situation to help working class communities, to rebuild our national infrastructure and to improve the environment? What if we taxpayers said: It's our money being used for this bailout, so we want a voice and a vote in running these companies, not only to save workers' jobs and communities, but also to rebuild the country and to protect the world's environment? What might that look like?
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Invention: Diamond dialysis implant 
Kidney failure currently affects around 400,000 people in the US and countless others around the world. And even for people who can access it, plugging into a dialysis machine is a far from an ideal solution.

As well as forcing people to structure their lives around the process, dialysis is not as efficient as a real kidney at removing toxic chemicals from the blood, while leaving important biomolecules untouched.

A new kind of filter can avoid those problems, though, and be small enough to implant inside the body, a new patent application claims.
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2014: A Tory dystopia 
David Cameron's apple-pie promises and feel-good rhetoric might sweep him to power in 2010, but there’s a yawning gap between the vagueness of his words and the likely consequences of his policies. Alex Nunns takes us on a trip into the future to see how Britain might look after four years of Tory rule.
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Boing Boing TV: One year! 
monochrom content info
Hey, and we are proud being part of it...
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City of Transformation: Paul Virilio in Obama's America 
By Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.
It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So too, Paul Virilio. His writings have captured brilliantly these twilight times in which we live: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, The Information Bomb, War and Cinema, Speed and Politics -- less writing in the traditional sense than an uncanny shamanistic summoning forth of the demonology of speed which inscribes society. A prophet of the wired future, Paul Virilio's thought always invokes the doubled meaning of apocalypse -- cataclysm and remembrance.

Cataclysm because all his writings trace the history of the technological death- instinct moving at the speed of light. And remembrance because Virilio is that rarity in contemporary culture, a thinker whose ethical dissent marks the first glimmerings of a fateful implosion of that festival of seduction, facination,terror, and boredom we have come to know as digital culture. A self-described "atheist of technology," his motto is "obey and resist."

But for all that there is a raw materialism in Virilio's reflection, nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex histories of electronic transactions as our most private autobiographies. Information mapping our lives -- process, principles, concept, fact -- we have all become measurable. In Virilio's writing what Hannah Arendt once described as "modern world alienation" rides the whirling tip of history as the spirit of pure negation that is everywhere today. Negative politics, negative subjectivity, negative culture. It is impossible to escape the technological accident that has become us.

But for all that history will not long be denied. Just as Nietzsche once prophesied in The Gay Science that with the birth of human subjectivity, twisted and scarred and deliriously unpredictable, the gods actually stopped their game of wagers and took notice because something new was moving on the earth -- a going across, a tremulous wakening, a pathway over the abyss -- so too with Virilio, the gods of history take notice once again. And not just take notice, but actively respond to the fatal challenge that is the thought of Paul Virilio.

Are we beyond Speed and Politics? [...]
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The Right To The City 
We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city.

Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being?
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How the US can learn to survive and thrive 
Fareed Zakaria’s new book explores the role of the United States in a new world order in which it can at best be a smart power rather than the ultimate power.
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Indian probe crash-lands onto the moon 
In the race to explore space, there may be a new moon on the rise. In the same week that NASA declared the Mars Phoenix mission over, India dropped a probe onto the moon today, the Associated Press reports. The probe took off from India's space probe Chandrayaan-1, which entered lunar orbit earlier this week. The probe, painted with the flag of India, was blown to smithereens after crashing into the moon at about 3,100 miles (5,000 km) per hour.
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UK Study: People Consuming More Music 
The study found 44 per cent of people polled claimed to have consumed more music this year than in 2007. As well as the swelling market for live music, this surge may have something to do with commercial harnessing of music through means other than record sales, since 69 per cent of "the most passionate music fans" agreed that brand affiliations provide a valuable new revenue stream for artists.
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Longitude forged: An eighteenth-century hoax 
How an eighteenth-century hoax has taken in Dava Sobel and other historians.
Most people know something of the events in 1714 when the British government instituted a prize for the discovery of a successful way to find longitude at sea. The aim was to reduce the heavy toll of shipwrecks caused by the crude navigational method of dead reckoning. Dava Sobel gave new life to this episode in her bestselling book, Longitude: The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time (1995), which inspired the widely viewed television programme Lost at Sea (aired in 1998). After these came a feature film directed by Charles Sturridge in 1999, starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons. All these versions place at their centre the heroic figure of John Harrison and his struggles to perfect a clock which would finally carry off the prize of £20,000. Meanwhile, an early rival who figures in the tale has gone down in history as another projector from Yorkshire, named Jeremy Thacker. Unfortunately Thacker never existed and his proposal now emerges as a hoax.
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Obama and the Left 
Obama's election victory last week was generally greeted with warmth and a healthy degree of scepticism by those on, or leaning towards, the left. Of course, almost everybody felt a degree of Schadenfreude at the defeat of the McCain-Palin ticket. The extent of the ‘Change' that can reasonably be expected from an Obama presidency, however, remains open for debate.
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Cassini Finds Mysterious New Aurora On Saturn 
Saturn has its own unique brand of aurora that lights up the polar cap, unlike any other planetary aurora known in our solar system. This odd aurora revealed itself to one of the infrared instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.



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Googorama / Update 
I just got a nice email by Roberto Winter/Googorama.
Hi there Johannes,

You probably don't remember, but a very long time ago you posted this on monochrom:
http://monochrom.at/english/2007/07/googorama.htm
that, eventually, led to this:
http://photo.net/street-documentary-photography-forum/00LzqU
and finally ended up being insightfully developed by an art critic and curator from Brazil (Tadeu Chiarelli).

He gave a speech a while ago that centered on googorama, but discussed other aspects of contemporary arts' production related to digital, net.art, photography and so on. I have just translated his speech to english and I feel almost obliged to have it get back to you, since you sort of started the whole process, you can find a PDF of the translation here:
rhwinter.com/tadeu_chiarelli_en.pdf
(I've also posted it back to Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/26641 )

I feel this is especially relevant to you since monochrom is cited directly, and also because Chiarelli implies how important these means of communication are for understanding the unfolding of contemporary arts' (hi)story and production.

Well, hope you have the time to read and enjoy it.

Regards,
Roberto



"New Kids On The Road Block": monochrom's Illegal Sculpture in Ljubljana 
monochrom content info
Setting up "New Kids On The Road Block" in front of Slovenian parliament and on the main square of Ljubljana. [Part of Sculpture Mobs.]

Pictures: Alex Davies.









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Sculpture Mob training in Ljubljana: Alex Davies' pictures 
monochrom content info
Alex Davies created a brilliant Flickr show of all his pictures of the Sculpture Mob training and illegal action in Ljubljana, Slovenia (November 8, 2008).







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Putting Psychology Into Behavioral Economics 
Behavioral economics and good psychology, there's a lot of art. There is science and there are well-crafted experiments, but thinking about what the right experiment to run, was art and, there are 80 gazillion experiments, which ones are relevant to getting people to plant the right seed. That's a problem that Sendhil and I have been talking about for, well, since he was born. You're now seeing the results of 15 years of conversations. And there wasn't a scientific way of answering that question.
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Understanding the Beijing Consensus 
The decades of the Washington Consensus and its imposition of a liberal model of world trade and financial good behaviour are over. What will replace it and which states will be the power-brokers?
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Artist Gives Away Art By Leaving It Around London 
Art worth an estimated £1m is being given away by one of the world's leading street artists, Adam Neate, in an exhibition that will see 1,000 pieces deposited across the capital and left for whoever wishes to take them.
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How Evolution Learns From Past Environments To Adapt To New Environments 
The evolution of novel characteristics within organisms can be enhanced when environments change in a systematic manner, according to a new study by Weizmann Institute researchers.
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Ronald Mallett: Space cowboy 
For more than 50 years, UConn physics professor Ronald Mallett had a secret. Now that it's out, we may be one step closer to traveling back in time.
Link (via DaddyD)



Monk Punch 
A news article describing an altercation between monks of different sects in front of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem. Both sides deny throwing the first punch.
Six Christian sects divide control of the ancient church. They regularly fight over turf and influence, and Israeli police are occasionally forced to intervene. A ladder placed on a ledge over the entrance sometime in the 19th century has remained there ever since because of a dispute over who has the authority to take it down.
Just where are they drawing their authority from?

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"New Kids On The Road Block": monochrom's Illegal Sculpture in Graz 
monochrom content info
Here is a nice picture of our illegal public sculpture in Graz: "New Kids On The Road Block"...



Photo credit: Eddie Codel.

Soon: more pictures.



Sculpture Mob Training in Graz: Eddie Codel's pictures 
monochrom content info
Eddie Codel posted some great pictures of our Sculpture Mob training camp in Graz at the Elevate Festival.







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Awesome: Gesture Control 
Mgestk Technologies unveils a new gesture control system that "makes use of nothing more than an 'affordable 3D camera' and some custom software to capture even small hand gestures."



Link (via Zeljko Lajic, metalab list)



Oxford Researchers List Top 10 Most Annoying Phrases 
Not all University of Oxford researchers are uptight and humorless, "irregardless" of what you might think. In fact, a bunch of them compiled a list of the Top 10 Most Irritating Expressions in the English language -- just because we needed one.
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Space shuttle is key issue for Obama, agency says 
US president-elect Barack Obama will need to decide soon whether to retire the space shuttle in 2010 or extend its life, a government oversight office said on Thursday.

The space shuttle is one of 13 'urgent' issues that face the next US president, according to a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) list. "These are issues that will require the attention of the President and Congress early on in the next administration," says GAO spokesperson Chuck Young.

Deciding the fate of the shuttle is particularly time-sensitive, Young says. If the government decides to fly more shuttle missions, it could impact how quickly NASA can move forward with a shuttle replacement, set to be ready to fly by March 2015.
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The emerging moral psychology 
Experimental results are beginning to shed light on the psychological foundations of our moral beliefs.
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Gone in 900 seconds: Why you shouldn't use WPA anymore 
Franky writes:
If you still use WPA as encryption standard of your wireless access point, you better switch to WPA2 now, because a new hacker playground just has been opened. My recommendation: Leave your WLAN open and do others a favour (flatrate is a nice thing anyways) - and use strong encrypted VPN software for accessing whatever needs to be secure.
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Obama Win Causes Obsessed Backers To See How Empty Lives Are 

Tears for Obama 
Just wonderful.



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Obama 
PRINT "OBAMA"
GOSUB HOPE



The Innermost Unifier: Corporate Anthems @ HAIP festival 
monochrom content info
Johannes Grenzfurthner will present a talk/audio performance @ HAIP festival. Friday, November 7, 8:00 PM at Kiberpipa/Ljubljana.
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.



Sculpture Mob in Training: Graz and Ljubljana 
monochrom content info
On November 6 we will administer a couple of basic Sculpture Mob training sessions in Graz, Austria -- as part of the Elevate festival.



We will create a simulated parking space and participants will learn how to erect a sculpture in just 5 minutes before "security" is called.

More trainings can be joined on November 8 in Ljubljana, Slovenia -- as part of the HAIP festival.



Link



Biologists Discover Motor Protein That Rewinds DNA 
Two biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered the first of a new class of cellular motor proteins that “rewind” sections of the double-stranded DNA molecule that become unwound, like the tangled ribbons from a cassette tape, in “bubbles” that prevent critical genes from being expressed.
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What will a new president do for the arts? 
What would an Obama or McCain presidency do for the arts? Or will the new President's hands be tied by the economic turmoil?
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Studs Terkel, Listener to Americans, Dies at 96 
Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre, and who for decades was the voluble host of a popular radio show in Chicago, died Friday at his home there. He was 96.
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Jonathan Mann reports about the Proposition 8 Protest 

Eddie Codel: New monochrom resident artist 
monochrom content info
Our new artist in residence arrived! Yeah!

Eddie Codel is a videographer, documentary filmmaker, technologist, political activist, open source evangelist, robot enthusiast and occasional conference organizer who strongly believes in the notion of empowering others through open information exchange. Codel currently resides in San Francisco where he makes online videos for political campaigns, blogs, Internet startups and produces Geek Entertainment TV, a weekly videoblog on passionate geeks.

Codel was previously in Vienna & Graz in 2006 presenting on videoblogging, underground robotic art of San Francisco and zombies.

Codel's video work includes the upcoming Big Sur Fire documentary, various productions for Geek Entertainment TV, Boing Boing TV, Digg, Revision3, io9, Mahalo Daily, ChannelFlip, Nokia Productions, the San Francisco Chronicle and LunchMeet TV.

Codel has presented at numerous conferences including SXSW Interactive & Film, SF Music Tech Summit, Northern Voice, Roboexotica, Pixelodeon, Netsquared, Webzine, Podcast Hotel and the Consumer Electronics Show.

Codel co-founded and organized the Webzine conference series which began in 1998 in San Francisco. The mission of Webzine is to empower individuals and artists through storytelling and media creation on the Internet.

Codel has been a member of the machine arts group SRL since 1999, is a guestblogger for culture blog Laughing Squid and maintains his personal website and blog at eddie.com.




Big Brother Awards 2008: Pictures 
monochrom content info
A couple of good pictures of our 'Special Postal Services' performance at the Big Brother 2008 gala in Vienna.



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10th anniversary of Soul Sale: monochrom's spirituo-capitalistic market stand 
monochrom content info
Unbelievable, but it was 10 years ago today that we opened up our spirituo-capitalistic market stand in the center of Vienna.

A total of fifteen high-quality souls were purchased and registered. These souls are still being offered for sale to third parties with power of disposal. We still understand the project – beyond all philosophical discourses and argumentation seeking to prove God's existence – in the classical sense of a market driven by supply and demand. The soul is a tradable commodity, a form of virtual capital.



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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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