monocon is an unconference that has been taking place since 2018. It features open workshops, lectures and presentations. Content and schedule are developed by the participants based on their working fields, knowledge and interests at the beginning of the conference.
monocon is organized by the international art-technology-philosophy collective monochrom, founded in 1993. The group works with a wide variety of media and art formats and publishes the monochrom book and magazine series.
The group describes their way of working as »context hacking« and thus refers to the hacker culture, which propagates a creative and emancipatory approach to the technologies of the digital age and thus opposes the extension of a centuries-old culture of technological knowledge and the expert hierarchies into the digital age. With its electronic mass media, the democratization or socialization of the means of production seems feasible for the first time (without needing anything other than the technical revolution).
Context hacking transfers the hackers’ claims and approaches to those social and societal conditions in which artistic production takes place and on which it in turn depends. In a metaphorical sense, these also have a source code. They run programs that we face on a user interface. Where we know how and through what a space, a niche, a scene, a subculture, a media or political practice works, we can change and »recode« it, deconstruct its power relations and emancipate ourselves from their constraints and ways of dressing.
when & where: Thursday, June 30 – Sunday, July 3, 2022. @ Verein Symposion Lindabrunn, lower austria.