[ B l o g / / Archive]


Arse Elektronika 2009: "Of Intercourse and Intracourse" / Call 
monochrom content info
Sexuality, Genetics, Biotech, Wetware, Body mods.

Call for Papers, Performances, Machines and Sponsors.
Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called "Culture" in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the "Culture" are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete - on command - mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established.
Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" -- you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century.
Don't you think, replicants?

Please send us your papers, ideas, machines! Deadline: July 31, 2009!
Festival Schedule:

October 1: Film festival(*), opening ceremony and Prixxx Arse Elektronika(*) Gala
October 2: Literature, fiction, reading
October 3: Talks and discourse
October 4: DIY workshops

(*) Separate calls will be out shortly.
Arse Elektronika 2009 will take place in San Francisco, USA.

Link



Bob Ross, the People's Painter - Happy Trees 

Darwin vs. Freud: The Evolutionary Enigma of Dream Content 
In a recent review of evolutionary theories concerning the possible adaptive function of dreaming, Barrett shrugs off the better-known psychoanalytic theories of dreams (for example, Freud's "wish fulfillment" and Jungian archetypes) as being irreconcilable with a Darwinian framework and instead highlights the major contemporary, biologically informed theories. Remember, the key question for us to consider is why dreaming occurs at all, since it's not immediately apparent why natural selection wouldn't have simply engineered a dreamless, non-REM sleep.
Link



Domestic Wars Redux: Obama, Digital Prohibition and the New 'Reefer Madness' 
January 2009: In a reflexive public gesture, the U.S.'s first African-American President-elect, the ectomorphic Barack Obama, retraced Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural train route (1865) to the capitol, two hundred years after the birth of the similarly ectomorphic Lincoln. In another reflexive echo of a turbulent past, as the bloated and behemoth U.S. economy wobbled, cold-turkey, in withdrawal from its macro-economic drugs of choice, easy credit and unbridled consumption, Obama faced a dire economic and social configuration similar to that which confronted Franklin Roosevelt in March of 1933. Hemorrhaging jobs, personal and institutional debt while spewing endemic mortgages defaults, the U.S. faced its most severe legitimacy crisis since the late 1960s.

As a marker that the past sins of slavery and segregation could be jettisoned in favor of meritocratic ascension, there could be no better legitimation symbol than Barack Obama. Articulate, attractive, with an understated ironic tone, and often frank in discussing personal failings, Obama simultaneously signified the ultimate success of a new African-American class of elites while buttressing faltering cross-ethnic, cross-racial and cross-generational allegiances to the tattered tenets of the American Dream. Exemplified by street artist Shepard Fairey's red, white and blue iconic poster of Obama's upturned visage, the human heart's desire for "Hope" (often embodied in ideological allegiances) became thoroughly conflated, through Fairey's composition, with Obama's message and image. Fairey's widely reproduced icon was a masterful and thoroughly intentional gesture in the aesthetics of politics, praised both by the original Associated Press photographer, and by Obama, himself.

Yet what has happened to Fairey, in the wake of this representational triumph, may be instructive. Two weeks after the Obama inauguration, Fairey was simultaneously threatened with a lawsuit by the Associated Press (which claimed a violation of their Intellectual Property rights) over how he appropriated some elements of a 2006 AP photo, just as he was arrested on graffiti charges, in Boston, on the opening night of his first major formal exhibit ("Supply and Demand") at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The AP's legal threat, Fairey's simultaneous arrest (combined with the non-starter drug-use revelations in Obama's autobiographical Dreams From My Father and the likely and significant reduction in the U.S.'s broad and expensive incarceration of non-violent drug users) arguably signifies a transition in the objects of Prohibition, as the portion of the generation-long War on Drugs that has targeted recreational users ratchets down. This downshift occurs just as the Baby Boomers retire, en masse, accessing expensive entitlements, and as state governments find that they can no longer afford to house, feed, clothe and provide Federally-mandated medical services for aging inmates, many who were given long prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses.
Link



Paul Mason's "Meltdown": developing a coherent alternative to neoliberalism 
Larry Elliott welcomes Paul Mason's new book Meltdown, because it takes forward the urgent task facing the left of developing a coherent alternative to neoliberalism. But Elliott urges us also to seek solutions to the climate and energy crisis simultaneously with the financial crisis.
It's the end of an era. Things will never be the same again. The age of neoliberalism is dead. How many times have we heard those pat phrases these past 18 months or so as what started as a little local difficulty in the US housing market developed into the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There are certainly good reasons for the left to believe that the tide has at last turned after three decades in which the right has been in the ascendancy. As Paul Mason illustrates in this excellent account of the humbling of the former masters of the universe, the crash was the consequence of 'giant hubris and the untrammelled power of a financial elite'.

The events of 2007-09 have been big finance’s equivalent of the British labour movement's 'winter of discontent' 30 years previously. Public disgust at the excesses and incompetence of the bankers has meant there has rarely been a better time for a radical shift leftwards in politics. But it is one thing saying the conditions are ripe for change, another thing altogether bringing that change about.

Think about it for a second. Ever since the crisis began, the prime aim of governments – most notably Gordon Brown’s – has been to put the genie back in the bottle. There is nothing the prime minister would like more than to return to life as it was in June 2007, when, on the eve of moving into 10 Downing Street, he used his Mansion House speech to praise the 'ingenuity and creativity' of the City, contrasting Britain's light-touch regulation with the heavy-handed approach favoured by the Americans.

As a result, the government went to extraordinary lengths to avoid nationalising Northern Rock and has taken other parts of the financial sector into part or full state ownership only with extreme reluctance. It is even ploughing on with the deeply unpopular part-privatisation of the Royal Mail.
Link



'Neurologger' Reads Bird Brains In Flight 
Using a "neurologger" specially designed to record the brain activity of pigeons in flight, researchers reporting online on June 25th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, have gained new insight into what goes through the birds' minds as they fly over familiar terrain.
Link



monochrom: new event calendar/RSS feature 
monochrom content info
Well, we planned -- and delayed -- it for a long time, but now it's reality (whatever reality means). Our great intern David Brunnthaler (clap, clap!) helped us setting up a new (RSS) calendar feature for the German and English monochrom site. Check it out.



Link / Site
Link / English RSS

(By the way, RIP Michael "Foucault" Jackson.)



PostSecret: mail art project about secrets 
PostSecret is an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. Select secrets are then posted on the PostSecret website, or used for PostSecret's books or museum exhibits.



Link



Dorkbot Vienna #9: Martin Kaltenbrunner (reacTIVision, TUIO, reactable) 
monochrom content info
Dorkbot Vienna #9 is being hosted by J Grenzfurthner (monochrom). Thanks to the Metalab!
Martin Kaltenbrunner is a Human Computer Interaction Designer, currently finalizing his Ph.D. at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. Recently he has been mainly working on the interaction design of the reacTable - a tangible modular synthesizer based on a multi-touch surface. He is author of the open source tangible interaction framework reacTIVision and the related TUIO protocol, which has been widely adopted for open source multi-touch applications. He is co-founder of reactable systems SL, dedicated to the development of novel HCI concepts and products, while he is teaching classes and workshops on tangible interaction at the Kunstuniversität Linz and at the UCP Porto.

http://modin.yuri.at/

reacTIVision is an open source, cross-platform computer vision tool for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers attached onto physical objects, as well as for multi-touch finger tracking.

http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/

TUIO is an open framework that defines a common protocol and API for tangible multi-touch surfaces. The TUIO protocol allows the transmission of an abstract description of interactive surfaces, including touch events and tangible object states. There exists a growing number of TUIO enabled tracker applications and TUIO client libraries for various programming environments, as well as applications that support the protocol. This combination of TUIO trackers, protocol and client implementations allows the rapid development of table based tangible multitouch interfaces.

http://www.tuio.org/

The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving and rotating physical objects on a luminous round table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

The instrument has been developed by a team of digital luthiers, the two Austrian researchers Martin Kaltenbrunner and Günter Geiger and their Spanish colleagues Marcos Alonso and Sergi Jord, working at the Music Technology Group within the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. This multidisciplinary team of researchers, musicians and designers  has been awarded with various international prizes such as the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, two D&AD Yellow Pencils and the prize if the city of Barcelona.

After its overwhelming success on Youtube and since the Icelandic singer Björk has incorporated the instrument during her last Volta world tour, the reacTable has become widely known to the general public.

http://www.reactable.com/
Sunday, June 28, 2009.
7 PM @ Metalab Vienna (Rathausstrasse 6, 1010 Vienna)

Link



'Worm porn' video shows details of nematode sex 
Some might call it worm porn, but a video showing a male worm preparing to mate with a hermaphrodite could equally be described as balletic in its graceful movement.



Link



US patent 5255452: Michael Jackon's anti-gravity lean 
US patent 5255452, filed by Michael Jackson, described the anti-gravity lean used in the music video for "Smooth Criminal".



Link



Stoned wallabies make crop circles 
Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around "as high as a kite", a government official has said.
Link (via Mae Saslaw)



Free Speech vs. Surveillance in the Digital Age 
Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. Cell phones can capture video and send it wirelessly to the Internet. People can send eyewitness accounts, photos and videos, with a few keystrokes, to thousands or even millions via social networking sites. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.

A Wall Street Journal report this week claimed that the "Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale." The article named Nokia Siemens Networks as the provider of equipment capable of "deep packet inspection." DPI, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, "enables Internet Service Providers to intercept virtually all of their customers’ Internet activity, including Web surfing data, e-mail and peer-to-peer downloads."

Nokia Siemens has refuted the allegation, saying in a press release that the company "has provided Lawful Intercept capability solely for the monitoring of local voice calls in Iran." It is this issue, of what is legal, that must be addressed. "Lawful intercept" means that people can be monitored, located and censored. Global standards need to be adopted that protect the freedom to communicate, to dissent.
Link



Complexity and Causality in Nutritional Research 
The complex and difficult problem of causality is central to our understanding of nutrition research. A cause is defined as "that factor which is possible or convenient for us to alter in order to produce or prevent an effect. This concept contains two components: production of an effect and an understanding of its mechanisms." To understand current concepts of causality, it is helpful to briefly review historical thinking about it. Aristotle believed that bodies in motion required constant force (efficient cause) to keep them moving, that the seed contained the adult (teleological cause). After more than 2,000 years, Newton overturned Aristotle in physics with the concept of inertia. Hume further advanced our understanding by postulating that our notion of causality depends on well-documented associations. Partially correct, Kant believed the mind (brain) imposes notions of time, extension, and causality on nature.
Link



Immortality, Glory And Happiness 
This is what the Greeks called 'glory,' and it expresses a very different understanding of immortality than is common amongst us. One lives on only through the stories, accounts and anecdotes that are told about one. It is in this that happiness consists. This has a very peculiar consequence for societies like the United States, so singlemindedly devoted to the pursuit of happiness. We assume that the question of happiness is a question of my happiness or, more properly, of my relation to my happiness. But why?
Link



monochrom's "Department For Criticism Against Globalisation" @ Common History/MUSA/Vienna 
monochrom content info
Our installation "Department For Criticism Against Globalisation" will be on display as part of MUSA's exhibition Common History and Its Private Stories (Vienna; June 26 thru October 3). Curators: Iara Boubnova and Roland Fink.

The exhibition "Common History and Its Private Stories. Geschichte und Geschichten" is an attempt to honour the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall not so much as the main event of recent European history but as an event with massive implications; an event, which triggered a succession of political and global events that are defining our lives in the last 20 years. [...] Due to the strong increase in dialogue and cooperation in the world of politics, business, art and culture, it has become necessary to readjust and fine-tune our attitude towards everything that is different. National and international aspects have been increasingly intermingled, public entities have been privatised – all these aspects have shaped the recent common history in Europe and beyond.

With works a.o. by: Hildegard Absalon, Armin Bardel, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Libia Castro & Olafur Olafsson, Josef Dabernig, Heinrich Dunst, Anita Fricek, Marianne Greber, Matthias Herrmann, Christine Hohenbüchler, Robert Jelinek, Anna Jermolaewa, Ulrike Johannsen, David Jourdan, Dejan Kaludjerovic, Johanna Kandl, Martin Kitzler, Oleg Kulik, Marko Lulic, Ken Lum, Anna Meyer, Michail Michailov, monochrom, Muntean / Rosenblum, Lisl Ponger, Andreas Reiter Raabe, Peter Sandbichler, Kamen Stoyanov, Katharina Struber, Martina Stuffer, Magda Tothova, Borjana Ventzislavova, Gernot Wieland, Alexandra Zaitseva...
Link



Peter Custers: green means zero growth 
With the world economy in disarray and military expenditure spiralling, what hopes are there of a genuinely Green New Deal? In this month's podcast, George Miller talks to Peter Custers, an expert on the international arms trade, about his article "Towards zero growth", which argues that "an economy that refuses to grow" is exactly what the world economy must aim for. He sees positive signs in Germany's policy on renewable energy and offers his verdict on how green Barack Obama will turn out to be.
Link (podcast)



Too complex to exist: power grids, financial market? 
On Aug. 10, 1996, a single power line in western Oregon brushed a tree and shorted out, triggering a massive cascade of power outages that spread across the western United States. Frantic engineers watched helplessly as the crisis unfolded, leaving nearly 10 million people without electricity. Even after power was restored, they were unable to explain adequately why it had happened, or how they could prevent a similar cascade from happening again - which it did, in the Northeast on Aug. 14, 2003.

Over the past year we have experienced something similar in the financial system: a dramatic and unpredictable cascade of events that has produced the economic equivalent of a global blackout. As governments struggle to fix the crisis, experts have weighed in on the causes of the meltdown, from excess leverage, to lax oversight, to the way executives are paid.

Although these explanations can help account for how individual banks, insurers, and so on got themselves into trouble, they gloss over a larger question: how these institutions collectively managed to put trillions of dollars at risk without being detected. Ultimately, therefore, they fail to address the all-important issue of what can be done to avoid a repeat disaster.
Link



The Wold is an Apple (minus Madagascar) 




Where's Madagascar?

Link



Throw-n-fetch bot 

Researchers probe the genetic basis of memory 
A group of Montreal researchers has discovered that GCN2, a protein in cells that inhibits the conversion of new information into long-term memory, may be a master regulator of the switch from short-term to long-term memory. Their paper Translational control of hippocampal synaptic plasticity and memory by the eIF2a kinase GCN2, which was published in the journal Nature, provides the first genetic evidence that protein synthesis is critical for the regulation of memory formation.
Link



Bubblenomics: Economic cataclysms now and then 
Economic cataclysms such as the Great Depression or today's ongoing collapse of global finance destroy commonly held understandings of political and economic reality. That is one reason why we call them cataclysms; such events occur precisely because no one with the power to do anything about them saw them coming. Icebergs spotted in time do not, after all, sink ships. But once the conventional wisdom has joined prosperity and confidence in the wreckage on the ocean floor of the global economy, we begin to hear of 'the' explanations for what happened. Such proclamations mark the times as surely as collapsed Ponzi schemes, falling governments, ruined banks and suicides among the former nouveaux riches. Thus, in the aftermath of the Depression, there emanated from various quarters announcements that the reasons for the catastrophe lay in policy errors by the Federal Reserve, in the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Acts, in stock trading on the margin, in vengeful treatment of Germany in the Versailles Treaty and so forth.

Similarly, the present-day plunge into the economic abyss has again brought forth a smorgasbord of assertions about 'the' cause: mad scientists let loose in dealing rooms, squishy liberals dishing out mortgages to the coloured, inscrutable Chinese officials 'manipulating' their yuan, feckless American central bankers throwing the gasoline of low interest rates on a briskly burning fire of asset inflation, Robert Rubin and his cronies in the Clinton White House tearing up regulations, George W. Bush waging wars of choice while cutting taxes on the rich—the discriminating diner can pick and choose what best suits his or her ideological tastes and preconceptions.

In The Credit Crunch: Housing Bubbles, Globalisation and the Worldwide Economic Crisis, Graham Turner has placed on the buffet table his own explanation for what has gone wrong, and it is a good deal more appetizing than many. Turner lays the blame for the current crisis squarely at the feet of the holy of holies of conventional economic orthodoxy: the 'unquenchable enthusiasm for raw free trade.' Given the near-total absence of any warning of the crisis from right-thinking academic economists, the distaste of the latter for such an account should provide no grounds for rejecting Turner's offering out of hand.
Link



monochrom: updated t-shirt site online 
monochrom content info
We encountered some major problems with t-shirt delivery to the US. But we are glad being able to inform you that all our shirts are now available for US customers. We know we live in a time of major financial turmoil, especially in the US. But we don't care. Even if it's kinda non-existing and fakeish, we still *love* the North American market.

And we have a new shirt in German language -- "man spricht antideutsch"... just in case you are interested in the "exotic".



Link / Order



Construction Begins on Spaceport America 
After years of planning, ground is officially being broken in New Mexico for the world's first interstellar airport.


Link



UK Cabinet Secretaries' Notebooks from World War Two 
The UK Government National Archives have released the Cabinet Secretaries' Notebooks from World War Two. These notes give a few brief snippets about the views of Churchill and his war cabinet to events of WWII.

There is, for example, a transcript of a meeting on the 15th June 1942, discussing reprisals for German Massacre of a Czechoslovakian Village. Churchill favored the summary execution of Nazi leaders by Electric Chair at this meeting. Another meeting was a discussion of how to come to terms with the American policy of segregation to its 'coloured' troops.

Link



Geonames / The countries of the world in their own languages and scripts 
I can't stop spending hours and hours on this site...
"The countries of the world in their own languages and scripts; with official names, capitals, flags, coats of arms, administrative divisions, national anthems, and translations of the countries and capitals into many languages") to get to the meat of the site, a collection of links to various pages: Days, Months, Planets, Mountains, etc.; a huge list of languages with each name given in the original (with transliteration where appropriate); various other random items (including a small set of famous people: it's fun to see the varying forms of Charlemagne); an Alphabets section; and finally a set of Glossaries, with a few hundred English words translated into, well, everything (divided into manageable sets: Albanian|Greek|Armenian, American|Polynesian, Asian, Balto-Slavic, Basque|Caucasus, Celtic, Constructed, etc.).
Link (via Languagehat)



Israeli scientists show bacteria can plan ahead 
Bacteria can anticipate a future event and prepare for it, according to new research at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In a paper that appeared in Nature, Prof. Yitzhak Pilpel, doctoral student Amir Mitchell and research associate Dr. Orna Dahan of the Institute's Molecular Genetics Department, together with Prof. Martin Kupiec and Gal Romano of Tel Aviv University, examined microorganisms living in environments that change in predictable ways. Their findings show that these microorganisms' genetic networks are hard-wired to 'foresee' what comes next in the sequence of events and begin responding to the new state of affairs before its onset.
Link



Argentina's Community Media Fights for Access and Legal Reform 
In response to misinformation and lack of access in the mass media, citizens have created alternative media networks that play a fundamental role in today's Latin America. Together, these community television stations are transforming the media landscape throughout the Americas. This redefined space for independent media has three vital functions: disseminating alternative information; providing a space for popular voice and especially the voice of groups underrepresented in the media; and building community. In Argentina, citizen media groups simultaneously fight for autonomous spaces and for reforms in media laws that will allow them to operate legally.
Link



British Library Puts 19th-Century Newspapers Online 
Bad news is never new, but anyone overwhelmed by today's political scandals, wars, financial disasters, soaring unemployment and drunken feral children can take refuge in the 19th century - and its wars, financial disasters, political scandals, soaring unemployment and drunken feral children. Over two million pages of 19th and early 20th century newspapers go online today, part of the vast British Library collection.
Link



Drill! Drill! The return of trepanation 
In the early 1960s, a young Russian neurophysiologist called Yuri Moskalenko travelled from the Soviet Union to the UK on a Royal Society exchange programme. During his stay, he co-authored a paper published in Nature. "Variation in blood volume and oxygen availability in the human brain" may not sound subversive, but it was the start of a radical idea.

Decades later, having worked in Soviet Russia and become president of the Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, Moskalenko is back in the UK. Now collaborating with researchers at the Beckley Foundation in Oxford, his work is bearing fruit.

And strange fruit it is. With funding from the foundation, he is exploring the idea that people with Alzheimer's disease could be treated by drilling a hole in their skull. In fact, he is so convinced of the benefits of trepanation that he claims it may help anyone from their mid-40s onwards to slow or even reverse the process of age-related cognitive decline. Can he be serious?
Link



CIA Secrecy on Drone Attacks Data Hides Abuses 
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's refusal to share with other agencies even the most basic data on the bombing attacks by remote-controlled unmanned predator drones in Pakistan's northwestern tribal region, combined with recent revelations that CIA operatives have been paying Pakistanis to identify the targets, suggests that managers of the drone attacks programmes have been using the total secrecy surrounding the programme to hide abuses and high civilian casualties.
Link



Common Fish Species: 'Human' Ability To Learn? 
Although worlds apart, the way fish learn could be closer to humans' way of thinking than previously believed, suggests a new research study.
Link



Cyberscares About Cyberwars Equal Cybermoney: Watching the Cybermilitary-Industrial Complex Form 
Frida Berrigan writes:
As though we don't have enough to be afraid of already, what with armed lunatics mowing down military recruiters and doctors, the H1N1 flu virus, the collapse of bee populations, rising sea levels, failed and flailing states, North Korea being North Korea, al-Qaeda wannabes in New York State with terrorist aspirations, and who knows what else -- now cyberjihadis are evidently poised to steal our online identities, hack into our banks, take over our Flickr and Facebook accounts, and create havoc on the World Wide Web.

Late last year, in a 96-page report, Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) warned that "America's failure to protect cyberspace is one of the most urgent national security problems facing the new administration." In a similar fashion, Dr. Dorothy Denning, a cybersecurity expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, has just described the Internet as a "powerful tool in the hands of criminals and terrorists." And they're hardly alone.

To this fear chorus, our thoughtful, slow-to-histrionics President added his voice in a May 29th East Room address:
"In today's world, acts of terror could come not only from a few extremists in suicide vests but from a few key strokes on a computer -- a weapon of mass disruption... This cyberthreat is one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation."
Uh-oh, and as we know, cybercrime is already on the rise. According to the president, the U.S. experienced 37,000 cyberattacks in 2007, an 800% increase from 2005. He referenced a study estimating that cybercrime has cost Americans $8 billion in the last two years. A trillion dollars worth of business information has reportedly been stolen from the corporate world.
Link



Brazil: more dependent than ever 
President Lula fancied his country's economy was 'decoupled' from the rest of the world's. But when the economic crisis reached Brazil this March, it came on a tidal wave. Half a million people are now in poverty or extreme poverty.
Link



Finger popping time: Africa 

Bitterness: The Next Mental Disorder? 
No one could accuse the American Psychiatric Association of missing a strain of sourness in the country, or of failing to capitalize on its diagnostic potential. Having floated "Apathy Disorder" as a trial balloon, to see if it might garner enough support for inclusion in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the world's diagnostic bible of mental illnesses, the organization has generated untold amounts of publicity and incredulity this week by debating at its convention whether bitterness should become a bona fide mental disorder.
Link



Twitter client for the Commodore 64 

Antonio Negri: "Keynes's communism of capital" 
Keynes believed in the virtues of finance; he even had an equivocal relationship with the Stock Exchange until he got kicked in the teeth – as often happens even to the most adept. (I disagree here with his biographer Harrod, who claimed that Keynes had financial speculation in his heart.) From Keynes's realistic point of view, the virtue of finance was that it was the beating heart of capitalism. Keynes subverted the old moralist conceptions that, from the Middle Ages to Hilferding, had downplayed and disqualified the hegemony of money in the production of wealth and the reproduction of social order. Against them, Keynes claimed that financial markets functioned as wealth multipliers. Can this theoretical assumption still be valid in a period of economic crisis? 'Of course it can', he asserted from his position in the middle of the crisis that started in the 1920s and assumed gigantic proportions by the end of the same decade. The state will have to intervene in society and reorganize it productively: 'Thus it is to our best advantage to reduce the rate of interest to that point relatively to the schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital at which there is full employment.'

This was how the entire therapeutic cookbook of Keynsianism emerged out of the crisis that kept affecting development. In building a new model of equilibrium whilst being pragmatic and keeping the continuous lack of equilibrium in mind, Keynes proposed to determine a persisting imbalance of state initiative through deficit spending. However, this deficit created new margins for effective demand and aided the development of capitalist dynamics whilst accepting the severe rigidity in workers' wages. This was the way class struggle got reabsorbed into the system of capital.

Keynes's proposal was wholly progressivist. He fully recognized it when, in the negotiations leading to the establishment of the Bretton Woods system of international monetary relations, he faced the opposition of the conservative representatives of Washington who were not willing to allow the currency of reference to forget a real standard, as this standard was the dollar that functioned as a means to organize labour and its international division based on the accumulation of gold in the US Central Bank. For them, deficit spending – which each capitalist and national government could have advanced so as to progressively contain the movements of its national working class, who sought to change society and break the capitalist yoke – needed to be controlled by a capitalist centre, the Komintern of Wall Street. Farewell to the illusion of bancor, Keynes's great invention, an ideal currency based on free exchange that could have given way to the establishment of different equilibriums that referred to the desires of populations and the intensity of the struggle of the organized working class...
Link



Watchmen: Semiotic Superheroes 
Since their beginning, superhero flicks have always scavenged special effects magic and visual style from the tables of preceding adventure films rather than their original source material, comic books themselves. Superman could only fly through Metropolis after Skywalker flew through the Death Star Trench; Batman only became a believable crime-fighter in the vein of Jason Bourne’s hyper-realism; and I groaned aloud in the theater when my own best-loved comic hero, Spider-Man, performed a horribly superfluous Matrix-esque slow motion flip-dodge to evade a hail of razor-sharp projectiles. Superheroes are homeless on the silver screen. The characters that inspired action films on a large scale too often prefer to dress themselves in the precedents other films rather than establishing their own stylistic identities. Good comics do more than depict fantastical stories about characters endowed with great power. They create an environment in which art and symbol converge to create semiotic storytelling that has the potential to transcend the written word. Is it possible then to develop a true "comic book film" genre, and would it have anything to contribute to the medium as a whole?

My answer: yes and yes—if it can avoid being mere extensions of the Tarantino B-movie aesthetic and if it is possible to ban Frank Miller from ever using a camera again.


Link



Plug and Play: Researchers Expand Clinical Study of Neural Interface Brain Implant 
BrainGate technology is designed to read brain signals associated with controlling movement, which a computer could translate into instructions for moving a computer cursor or controlling a variety of assistive devices.
Link



Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World 
Books are the last bastion of the old business model—the only major medium that still hasn't embraced the digital age. Publishers and author advocates have generally refused to put books online for fear the content will be Napsterized. And you can understand their terror, because the publishing industry is in big financial trouble, rife with layoffs and restructurings. Literary pundits are fretting: Can books survive in this Facebooked, ADD, multichannel universe?

To which I reply: Sure they can. But only if publishers adopt Wark's perspective and provide new ways for people to encounter the written word. We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading.
Link



Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution 
Helen Yaffe explores impact of Che Guevara as an economist and politician.
In my first A-level economics class, at the age of 16, I was taught these guiding principles; people only produce if they can make a profit, humans have infinite desires, while resources are limited, so everything must be rationed through the price mechanism – demand and supply.

No concept of production for need or socialist economics appeared on the curriculum. This was the early 1990s, the socialist bloc had collapsed and neo-liberalism was triumphant, or so we were told. Over the previous ten years, British Telecoms, the British water industry, British Rail, British Gas and British Coal had been packaged up and sold off to corporations and share holders.

Rational economic man, it was said, would ensure efficiency through privatisation and competition, even while, in the following years, prices rose and accidents increased in these fundamental services of the economy. Darwinism was recruited to the cause, as underdeveloped countries were forced to 'liberalise' their economies, selling their natural resources to foreign investors, rolling back the state, and removing obstacles to the 'revolutionising' power of market forces. In Latin America, the 'lost decade' of the 1980s and the 'Washington Consensus' of the 1990s saw debt crisis, restructuring and liberalisation plunge millions more into destitution, with or without inflated GDP statistics.

Amidst this neoliberal onslaught, Cuba stood almost alone. The collapse of the socialist bloc countries between 1989 and 1991 cut off 80 per cent of Cuba's trade, GDP plummeted by 35 per cent and food shortages decreased caloric intake by nearly 40 per cent. The crisis was exacerbated by punitive laws tightening the US blockade in 1990, 1992, and 1996. Despite entering a 'special period in time of peace', the Cuban revolution did not renege on political commitments to socialist welfare, state planning and the predominance of state property, even while forced to introduce pragmatic reforms – limited concessions to market forces – to stimulate the economy and get vital goods to the people.
Link



On Game Art, Circuit Bending and Speedrunning as Counter-Practice: 'Hard' and 'Soft' Nonexistence 
By Seb Franklin.
In The Exploit Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker speculate that "[f]uture avant-garde practices will be those of nonexistence." This extraordinary claim is a response to the current ubiquity of digital technology and its impact on cultural politics; if existence becomes a question of being classified informatically, the avoidance of this classification, or nonexistence, becomes of paramount importance. The discussion of nonexistence in The Exploit opens with a question, one that forms the basis of this essay: "how does one develop techniques and technologies to make oneself unaccountable for?" Directly following this question comes a specific, material example through which a crucial distinction between "unaccountable for" and "invisible" or "absent" is made -- the use of a laser pointer, aimed into a surveillance camera in order to 'blind' it. In this situation, the camera is not destroyed nor is the individual shining the laser actually hiding, or invisible; instead, they are simply not present on the particular screen or data set recorded by the camera in question. The same is true of the tricking of a server, causing it to record a routine event when one goes online. These kinds of tactics, "tactics of abandonment", are "positive technologies" for Galloway and Thacker. They are entirely distinct from absence, lack, invisibility and nonbeing because they are "full" or rather, because they "permeate." The practical consequences of Galloway and Thacker's formulation of nonexistence are clear: It's not a question of hiding, or living off the grid, but of living on the grid, in potentially full informatic view, but in a way that makes one's technical specification or classification impossible.
Link



Rat Brain Robot 
This robot is controlled by the brain of a rat - making it the world's first cyborg rodent:



 Link

Also, Cyborg rat things have their place in Snowcrash, as we are reminded in Cyberspace, Hypertext, and Critical Theory:
Haraway claims cyborgs allow us to escape domination by machines, since we have become the machines ourselves. Does this really hold true in the case of the rat-thing? The rat-thing is a slave to his machinery. It is a security device in the Snowcrash world, a mechanical dog which guards one's territory. The rat-thing is constructed from an actual live dog, and is mechanically advanced to the point where nobody really knows there is actually a dog inside the shell. This dog must stay in his (or her) temperature controlled hut to prevent from overheating, and is fed a simulacra world of never-ending Frisbee catching and steaks growing on trees to keep him occupied when he is not needed. The rat-thing waits for intruders, listening to the long range broadcasts of other rat-things, and monitering his millimeter-wave radio scanners to be sure no weapons are around.
Link



Godzilla Bukkake: Macroherpetophile image macros 

Tetris Theme on Church Organ during Service 

Slavoj Zizek: How To Begin From The Beginning 
In his wonderful short text ‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically betraying the cause. [...]
Link



Traveling-Wave Reactor: Cheaper and safer nuclear power? 
Unlike today's reactors, a traveling-wave reactor requires very little enriched uranium, reducing the risk of weapons proliferation. The reactor uses depleted-uranium fuel packed inside hundreds of hexagonal pillars (shown in black and green). In a "wave" that moves through the core at only a centimeter per year, this fuel is transformed (or bred) into plutonium, which then undergoes fission. The reaction requires a small amount of enriched uranium (not shown) to get started and could run for decades without refueling. The reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant; core temperatures are extremely hot--about 550 ºC, versus the 330 ºC typical of conventional reactors.
Link (via Franky)



tvwww feature about monochrom (Serbian language) 
monochrom content info
tvwww created a feature about monochrom in Serbian language. Check it out.



Link



The Penal State in an Age of Crisis 
By Hannah Holleman, Robert W. McChesney, John Bellamy Foster, and R. Jamil Jonna.
As a rule, crime and social protest rise in periods of economic crisis in capitalist society. During times of economic and social instability, the well-to-do become increasingly fearful of the general population, more disposed to adopt harsh measures to safeguard their positions at the apex of the social pyramid. The slowdown in the economic growth rate of U.S. capitalism beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s—converging with the emergence of radical social protest around the same period—was accompanied by a rapid rise in public safety spending as a share of civilian government expenditures. So significant was this shift that we can speak of a crowding out of welfare state spending (health, education, social services) by penal state spending (law enforcement, courts, and prisons) in the United States during the last third of a century...
Link



10 scientific objects that changed the world 
To mark its centenary, the Science Museum in London had its curators select the ten objects in its collection that made the biggest mark on history. Explore them in this gallery, and cast your vote in the public poll to decide the most significant of all.

For example: the Apollo 10 capsule.



Link



Freeman Dyson Takes On The Climate Establishment 
Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has been roundly criticized for insisting global warming is not an urgent problem, with many climate scientists dismissing him as woefully ill-informed. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Dyson explains his iconoclastic views and why he believes they have stirred such controversy.
Link



"European Culture & Journalism 2009" about monochrom 
monochrom content info
Well, nice little report for "European Culture & Journalism 2009" about monochrom. Although monochrom has nine members, and "Frenzfurthner" is not quite right... and I can't remember calling monochrom my "hobby"...
Hidden in Quartier21's main entrance - Electric Avenue - the Monochrom office could almost be mistaken for a rebellious teenager's unkempt bedroom. Magazine cut-outs, a cartoon of a pirate's head, two ping-pong paddles, a fake parrot and a poster that reads "BUSH CHENEY" are scattered all over a large green wall. But behind every image is a story – and a strong political message. The Monochrom office in Quartier21.

Though there is barely any space left on the tables – which are cluttered with stacks of folders, CD cases and books – Monochrom's five-member team somehow manages to work among the mess. But the disheveled space is what makes these guys passionate about what they do. After all, there are no rules at Monochrom, because their goal is to break the rules.
Link



The industrial model of student mass production 
By Don Tapscott.
In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.
Link



What Geithner, Bernanke and All the Smart Bankers Forget: Long-Term Economic Memory Loss 
Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration) writes:
If a person lives long enough, he can watch everyone forget everything they learned. Everyone includes Federal Reserve Chairmen, economists, Bank of America "strategists," and even Bloomberg.com.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks he can hold down US long-term interest rates by purchasing mortgage bonds and US Treasuries. Sixty years ago the Federal Reserve understood that this was an impossible feat. After an acrimonious public dispute with the US Treasury, in 1951 the Federal Reserve forced an "Accord" on the government that eliminated the Fed's obligation to monetize Treasury debt in order to hold down long term interest rates.

President Truman and Treasury Secretary John Snyder wanted to protect World War II bond purchasers by preventing any rise in interest rates, which would mean a decline in the price of the bonds.

The Fed understood that monetizing the debt to hold down interest rates meant loss of control over the money supply. The policy of suppressing interest rates could only work until the financial markets anticipated rising inflation and bid down the bond prices. If the Fed responded by buying more Treasuries, the money supply and inflation would rise faster.

Since Fed Chairman Bernanke announced his plan to purchase $1 trillion in mortgage and Treasury bonds in order to help the housing market with low interest rates, interest rates have risen. When will the Fed remember that printing money does not lower long-term interest rates?

According to Bloomberg (June 3), Bank of America strategists are recommending that investors buy Fannie Mae bonds because the rise in interest rates means the Fed will ramp up its purchases in order to prevent rising interest rates from adversely impacting the struggling housing market. When will financial gurus remember that printing money does not lower interest rates?
Link



Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze: America's Political Paralysis Over Torture 
Alfred W. McCoy writes:
If, like me, you've been following America's torture policies not just for the last few years, but for decades, you can't help but experience that eerie feeling of déjà vu these days. With the departure of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from Washington and the arrival of Barack Obama, it may just be back to the future when it comes to torture policy, a turn away from a dark, do-it-yourself ethos and a return to the outsourcing of torture that went on, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, in the Cold War years.

Like Chile after the regime of General Augusto Pinochet or the Philippines after the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, Washington after Bush is now trapped in the painful politics of impunity. Unlike anything our allies have experienced, however, for Washington, and so for the rest of us, this may prove a political crisis without end or exit.

Despite dozens of official inquiries in the five years since the Abu Ghraib photos first exposed our abuse of Iraqi detainees, the torture scandal continues to spread like a virus, infecting all who touch it, including now Obama himself. By embracing a specific methodology of torture, covertly developed by the CIA over decades using countless millions of taxpayer dollars and graphically revealed in those Iraqi prison photos, we have condemned ourselves to retreat from whatever promises might be made to end this sort of abuse and are instead already returning to a bipartisan consensus that made torture America's secret weapon throughout the Cold War.

Despite the 24 version of events, the Bush administration did not simply authorize traditional, bare-knuckle torture. What it did do was develop to new heights the world's most advanced form of psychological torture, while quickly recognizing the legal dangers in doing so. Even in the desperate days right after 9/11, the White House and Justice Department lawyers who presided over the Bush administration's new torture program were remarkably punctilious about cloaking their decisions in legalisms designed to preempt later prosecution.
Link



New Doubts About Dinosaur-bird Links 
Researchers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight – and the finding means it's unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs.
Link



New Honzo submission: the world commiserates! 
monochrom content info
We got a heart-warming new tribute to Honzo!

But you don't know Honzo? Well...
In 1952, Austrian big-game hunter and Africa ‘researcher’ Ernst Zwilling (a colonial revisionist and member of the Nazi party) brought a male chimpanzee from Cameroon to Schönbrunn, the Viennese zoo. In his African home, ‘Honzo’ had reportedly been a friendly and amiable animal, but in the zoo he began to show a rather violent temper. Due to his choleric outbreaks, poor Honzo was kept in solitary confinement. The chimpanzee was given beer and cigarettes. He got addicted and died an alcoholic and chain-smoker. After his death, the chimp was taxidermied and put into the Viennese Museum of Natural History. Now people from all over the world stare at him.

We want to create a page that is dedicated to Honzo: the victim, the choleric, the drug abuser.
Felix Knoke submitted a song! It's called "Honzo Crazy Disco Lazy". The lyrics are in German, but it's pretty much about Honzo visiting a birthday party. He is grumpy, drinks and smokes and kills all the guests with a big gun.

Link to all Honzo tributes



1984 thoughtcrime? Does it matter that George Orwell pinched the plot? 
This is a description of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was first published 60 years ago on Monday. But it is also the plot of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, a Russian novel originally published in English in 1924.

Orwell's novel is consistently acclaimed as one of the finest of the last 100 years – two years ago Guardian readers voted it the 20th century's "definitive" book – and it remains a consistent bestseller. Should it alter our respect for it that Orwell borrowed much of his plot, the outlines of three of his central figures, and the progress of the book's dramatic arc from an earlier work?

Orwell reviewed We for Tribune in 1946, three years before he published Nineteen Eighty-Four. In his review, he called Zamyatin's book an influence on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, though Huxley always denied anything of the sort. "It is in effect a study of the Machine," Orwell wrote of We, "the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again. This is a book to look out for when an English version appears." He seems to have taken his own advice.
Link



Theory claims that lethal warfare drove the evolution of altruism 
Lethal warfare drove the evolution of altruistic behaviour among ancient humans, claims a new study based on archaeological records and mathematical simulations.

If correct, the new model solves a long-standing puzzle in human evolution: how did our species transition from creatures interested in little more than passing down their own genes to societies of (generally) law-abiding (mostly) monogamists?

No one knows for sure when these changes happened, but climactic swings that occurred between approximately 10,000 to 150,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene period may have pushed once-isolated bands of hunter-gatherers into more frequent contact with one another, says Samuel Bowles, an evolutionary biologist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the University of Siena, Italy, who led the study. "I think that's just a recipe for high-level conflict."
Link



Airplanes: Man Vs. Machine? 
It's been well established that Air France Flight 447 went down because on-board computers received conflicting information from sensors on the outside of the plane. So...
A report from 2000 shows that, far from revealing an inadvertent design flaw, the difference highlights a real philosophical divide over whether computers or humans are best left to handle emergencies: It's essentially a question of what do you trust most-- a human being's ingenuity or a computer's infinitely faster access and reaction to information. It's not surprising that an American company errs on the side of individual freedom while a European company is more inclined to favor an approach that relies on systems.
Link



monochrom talk: The image of computers in popular music / Today @ Machine Project 
monochrom content info
"I can count every star in the heavens above but I have no heart I can't fall in love..."
A talk (with examples) by monochrom, presented by Johannes Grenzfurthner

@ Machine Project in Los Angeles; Saturday, June 6, 8:00 PM.

Link Boing Boing
Link LA Metblog



Pictures of monochrom's Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling @ Maker Faire Bay Area 2009 
monochrom content info
More pictures of our Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling at Maker Faire 2009! Please share your pics!



MMTW / Maker Faire 2009 / Flickr



monochrom's "Climate Training Camp": More pictures 
monochrom content info
More pictures of monochrom's "Climate Training Camp" in Berlin/Germany, last month.



Flickr Set / Link
Climate Training Camp



monochrom shirt orders: US customers 
Ok, we are setting up our tshirt shop for US customers. Our shirt "Slacking is killing the DIY industry" is already available for shipment in the US... and you will be able to order all other designs! Endless possibility to waste your precious US dollars! Eureka! Empowerment!



On Saturday: "I can count every star in the heavens above but I have no heart I can't fall in love..." @ Machine Project, Los Angeles 
monochrom content info
A talk (with examples) by monochrom, presented by Johannes Grenzfurthner

@ Machine Project in Los Angeles; Saturday, June 6, 8:00 PM.

Bourgeois culture was paralyzed and finally overrun by modern technologies which broke through the traditional class barriers. It went into a panic and produced these very stupid technophobic manifestos and images e.g. of "the computer". Pop music discovered and explored the computer not only as a musical instrument but also as something to sing and reflect about in a less aversive way. In doing so it influenced the conception people had of computers. The public image of computers was shaped by groups such as Kraftwerk as well as through obscure Schlager songs such as France Gall's "Computer No. 3". Not only was that image influenced by high culture computer panic but also by naïve technomania, and so it delivered the very dialectics of the computer as a means of cultural technology in capitalist society.



Link



"Slacking is killing the DIY industry" on Boing Boing, Laughing Squid and Make Blog 
monochrom content info
Cory says:
Monochrom's Maker Faire tee says it best: "Slacking is killing the DIY industry."


Link (BB)
Link (Make Blog)
Link (Laughing Squid)



Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling: Share your pics! 


[The Archives]

03/01/2004 - 04/01/2004   04/01/2004 - 05/01/2004   05/01/2004 - 06/01/2004   06/01/2004 - 07/01/2004   07/01/2004 - 08/01/2004   08/01/2004 - 09/01/2004   09/01/2004 - 10/01/2004   10/01/2004 - 11/01/2004   11/01/2004 - 12/01/2004   12/01/2004 - 01/01/2005   01/01/2005 - 02/01/2005   02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005   03/01/2005 - 04/01/2005   04/01/2005 - 05/01/2005   05/01/2005 - 06/01/2005   06/01/2005 - 07/01/2005   07/01/2005 - 08/01/2005   08/01/2005 - 09/01/2005   09/01/2005 - 10/01/2005   10/01/2005 - 11/01/2005   11/01/2005 - 12/01/2005   12/01/2005 - 01/01/2006   01/01/2006 - 02/01/2006   02/01/2006 - 03/01/2006   03/01/2006 - 04/01/2006   04/01/2006 - 05/01/2006   05/01/2006 - 06/01/2006   06/01/2006 - 07/01/2006   07/01/2006 - 08/01/2006   08/01/2006 - 09/01/2006   09/01/2006 - 10/01/2006   10/01/2006 - 11/01/2006   11/01/2006 - 12/01/2006   12/01/2006 - 01/01/2007   01/01/2007 - 02/01/2007   02/01/2007 - 03/01/2007   03/01/2007 - 04/01/2007   04/01/2007 - 05/01/2007   05/01/2007 - 06/01/2007   06/01/2007 - 07/01/2007   07/01/2007 - 08/01/2007   08/01/2007 - 09/01/2007   09/01/2007 - 10/01/2007   10/01/2007 - 11/01/2007   11/01/2007 - 12/01/2007   12/01/2007 - 01/01/2008   01/01/2008 - 02/01/2008   02/01/2008 - 03/01/2008   03/01/2008 - 04/01/2008   04/01/2008 - 05/01/2008   05/01/2008 - 06/01/2008   06/01/2008 - 07/01/2008   07/01/2008 - 08/01/2008   08/01/2008 - 09/01/2008   09/01/2008 - 10/01/2008   10/01/2008 - 11/01/2008   11/01/2008 - 12/01/2008   12/01/2008 - 01/01/2009   01/01/2009 - 02/01/2009   02/01/2009 - 03/01/2009   03/01/2009 - 04/01/2009   04/01/2009 - 05/01/2009   05/01/2009 - 06/01/2009   06/01/2009 - 07/01/2009   07/01/2009 - 08/01/2009   08/01/2009 - 09/01/2009   09/01/2009 - 10/01/2009   10/01/2009 - 11/01/2009   11/01/2009 - 12/01/2009   12/01/2009 - 01/01/2010   01/01/2010 - 02/01/2010  







.
.
.
.
.






















.
.
.
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





.
.
.
.
.