Biophysicists are growing Petri dishes of different species of bacteria in order to develop new antibiotics. The bacteria are subjected to different temperatures and have limited food sources inside the dish. Despite these conditions, most colonies tend to communicate and reproduce. Their growth results in unique patterns of varying colors--a sort of "bacteria painting." Researchers are hoping to learn more about the strategies the bacteria use to thrive, in order to find weaknesses that new drugs could exploit.

The idea that grief is work that we must do began with Freud. He believed that if you didn't labor at it, you would never recover the psychic energy you had invested in a person who was no longer there. Over time, psychologists developed ways to describe the various stages of this "work." Elizabeth Kübler-Ross' stages are the most familiar: Stage 1, denial--"This cannot be!" Stage 2, anger, followed by bargaining, then depression, then acceptance. The stages have great intuitive appeal, but, according to Bonanno, both Freud and Kübler-Ross were wrong. The way that grief unfolds for most people is almost nothing like the old model says it should. It is not work, and it doesn't occur in stages. It can be short-lived for some people and never-ending for others. Like breathing and consciousness and almost everything else about us, grief fluctuates. Our biggest mistake when describing grief, Bonanno writes in his deep and intelligent book, The Other Side of Sadness, is that we underestimate the resilience of the bereaved.

Modern scientists have by now thoroughly picked apart Freud and his idiosyncracies, but Bonanno says that Freud's pronouncements about grief were particularly incomplete. The father of psychoanalysis never really explained how "work" turned "grief" into "recovery." His statements were brief and preliminary, and he himself qualified them as pretty speculative. Kübler-Ross' stages of grief have been similarly accepted without any rigorous testing. It's also crucial to note that Kübler-Ross came up with her stages after observing people's reactions to the news that they themselves were going to die--not to the news that someone else had. Only later did she and colleagues apply "the five steps" to grief resulting from another person's death or to some other great disappointment.

The events of 1989 are most often depicted as the failure of socialism. It's a powerful interpretation that has served to discredit alternatives to the capitalist system, which is said to have triumphed, and to bestow upon capitalism an aura of legitimacy based not only on a reading of recent history but also on assumptions about the natural order, not least human nature. Capitalism, it is proposed, is the normal state of human traffic in what people make and value and need; socialism is the deviation. Capitalism responds to the nature of "man"--acquisitiveness, competition, egoism and the insatiable need for more. Socialism stands in the way of initiative, creativity and competition. Going by its nom de guerre, communism, it proposes radical equality in a world of unequals. Therefore, it can be maintained only by the coercive power of an entrenched elite and a repressive state. In the Eastern bloc, once that force was removed and party leaders lost confidence in their right to rule, communism naturally fell, and people's instinctual drives for material accumulation were liberated. Markets won out everywhere, even when democracy did not.

The first wave of volunteers in nifty OSHA-approved neon vests, buffed the ad spots with white paint, followed by a second wave of artists who added their unique touches, turning the locations into temporary public canvasses and challenging the outdoor advertising company’s claims to legitimacy.

This wins the prize for Best Rant Ever. A German live action role player (LARPer) named Kalle yells at Americans for being poseurs when they LARP. It devolves into Kalle beating the photographer with a stick.

The term "context hacking"­ -- like its older mimetic sibling "communication guerrilla" -- refers to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Context hacking is a specific style of political action drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for interventions by playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification.

Johannes Grenzfurthner will present some projects by monochrom, a worldwide operating collective from Vienna dealing with technology, art, and philosophy that was founded in 1993. The group specializes in an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, and political activism. Their mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost "in culture-archaeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment."
This talk was given as part of Google's Tech Talk series -- but was censored. Google statement: "Given the level of profanity, sexual content, and shocking images in it, I do not think it is appropriate for the Google Tech Talks channel on YouTube."

Hackers love knowledge. They try to find out how stuff works. And that's great. Experimentation is a major part of hacking. It is in the most philosophical sense a deconstruction of things.

A specific use is never inherent to an object, even though technical demagogues like to claim that it is. Just compare the term "self-explanatory" and the term "archeological find". It's a pretty hard task to find out what technology is and what it should do if you don't have a clue about the context. Usually the use is connected with the object through definition ("instructions for use"). Turning an object against the use inscribed in it means probing its possibilities.

Science and Technology Studies (especially Langdon Winner and Bruno Latour) have convincingly demonstrated that the widespread inability to understand technological artifacts as fabricated entities, as social and cultural phenomena, derives from the fact that in retrospect only those technologies that prove functional for a culture and can be integrated into everyday life are "left over." However, the perception of what is functional, successful and useful is itself the product of social and cultural, and last but not least political and economic processes. Selection processes and abandoned products (developmental derailments, sobering intermediary results, useless prototypes) are not discussed.

Well. What can we do?
We can fail. Beautifully.

With all the ridiculous awesomeness that has been floating out around the webs from last weekend's Arse Elektronika 2009 festival in San Francisco, I figure it's an appropriate time to introduce the most recent featured guest at ROFLCon II.

To be explicit, we're extraordinarily happy today to announce that Johannes Grenzfurthner, founder of monochrom, will be attending ROFLCon II! For those who don't know already, I could talk at length about the sheer badassery this gent produces: from their slickly sold wares to the creation of crypto-fictional finicky, irascible art geniuses, but I'll pretty much let him speak for himself in his bio:

Johannes Grenzfurthner's worldly existence could be summarized as artist, writer, director, researcher and troublemaker. He founded monochrom (an internationally acting art-tech-theory group) — and as part of monochrom he is responsible for Soviet Unterzoegersdorf and other tour-de-farce intertube occurrences. He is head of Arse Elektronika (sex and tech) festival in San Francisco and co-hosts Roboexotica (the only and therefore leading festival for Cocktail-Robotics). He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria. Tag cloud: crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania, despair, powernapping.

Johannes actually sent me a photo of him being exploded in two by a landmine from Monochrom's homebrew adventure game Soviet Unterzoegersdorf 2 — but I think this recent one above from Laughing Squid will more than suffice.

Ani Niow: Steampunk Vibrator
Jonathon Keats: Cinema Botanica: Pornography for Plants
Jason Scott: Historic research about and archiving of ancient online porn and digital erotic art / textfiles.com
Noah Weinstein and Randy Sarafan: Joydick
Uncle Abdul: Lifetime Award for his outstanding work in the field of electrostim
Rachel Lovinger: Costume Award

#arse2009 recharged my faith in humanity. plant porn! weird euro-pop! robot slaves from the 25th century! sex of the future! machinima! (chariejane)

Arse Elektronika 2009, the annual conference on sex, technology and the future, kicks off tonight.

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We seem to be on the edge of life itself, making it no better time than to think that like any other time when there's a prophetic series of events leading toward world destruction, our sexually charged sci-fi future is just as close as ever. I mean, for frak's sake, didn't we learn anything from Battlestar? (Other than, disappointingly, Starbuck is not gay.)

The rule seems to be that if the end is nigh, someone must have had sex with a cylon and we're reaping the consequences. Yes, the sex and tech conference Arse Elektronika 2009 Sex and Technology Festival starts tonight here in San Francisco, so it seems that we have all the symbolic signs we need. And, we might be wondering when we're going to start having future sex already and musing about how totally amazing it will certainly be. And we'll all be thinking the world is lame that we're not already having hot replicant sex-on-tap right now. The closest we can manage is a good line on cheap used Victoria's Secret mannequins (the kind with the wonderfully obscene nipples.)