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monochrom's Hacking The Spaces in The Guardian

At last weekend's HOPE 9 (Hackers on Planet Earth) in New York there were the usual minimalist queues for the women's lavatories – and a panel to discuss how to get more women to participate in the hackspaces. During the debate, a German woman recounted her experiences visiting hackspaces wherever she travelled. Sometimes, she said, she could sit for half an hour and no one would speak to her. The best advice from the panel organisers, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Sean Bonner was: stop complaining that there are no women around and just invite all your friends to participate. This might work for Young Rewired State, too: allow kids, male and female, to sign up in groups as well as individually so that shy kids would be sure to turn up on the day. And probably parents would be reassured if all the sponsoring locations made sure there were women as well as men acting as leaders.

monochrom: Flatten the road holes with caviar

Flatten the road holes with caviar:
Pleasure, irony and a deeper insight into the social forces: Kinder Surprise Monochrom

With the art group Monochrom – Austrian plural version of the enfant terrible – one can distantly connect the similarly outrageous actions of the notorious artist Günter Brus, who with performing vulgar actions while singing national hymn in front of the middle class audience of Vienna University got himself arrested.
Monochrom are in their performances, happenings, exhibitions, fanzines just as subversive and radical, although they claim that in the current society of control (by Deleuze) vulgar extremes are not shocking anymore, because the revolution against the governing classes is not possible as the control mechanism already exists within us. Brus has lived in Foucault's disciplinary society and ended up in prison, while Monochrom with comparable project, in which they publicly donate blood, process it in sausages and sell it to passers-by for 5 €, doesn’t even enter the newspapers.
They succeed far better by pointing out the painful, hidden and unreflected Austrian Nazism with some courage of radical art intervention: placing a soldier in the Nazi uniform inside a stall on the main street of Vienna with whom the citizens could shook hands, tap his shoulder, hug, stroke, in short "embrace" their Nazi past. Reinforcing this strong element in the Austrian collective unconscious could cause a violent reaction (Der Streichelnazi / Nazi Petting Zoo, 2008).
Technological and philosophical art group Monochrom with its eight members operates since 1993 and has its residence in Museumsquartier, the heart of Vienna's popular artistic district and attractive tourist location. As they say, they always like to transfer the particles from one reality to another, where they stand outside its context as bizarre, humorous, obtain a new meaning or become white spots.
Monochrom thoughtfully and scrupulously points to subtle exploitation of humans in a system that seemingly provides all: work, goals, rewards, lifestyle. It takes the burden of sacral, sublime and beautiful away from art and places it in the reach of us all, being creative beings. Therefore they collect office art, scribbled by office workers of the world during telephone conversations and gain surprising results.
Their actions are often underlined with philosophical and theoretical background and subtle humanism below the irony and deliberately offensive poking that gives away their liberalism. At the same time they put up a changing, distorted mirror of the world we live in. Their wide and fragmented list of works is united by their ideas that are at their core highly intellectual and ideological.
But their most striking quality in relation to their serious and competent artistic stand is certainly rare: the Monochrom gives you the feeling of having immense and insolent fun while making art.

Sierra Zulu Kickstarter: Press overview

Kurier Kult: "Crowdfunding für Unterzögersdorf"

Telepolis: "Monochrom will Science-Fiction-Komödie über Crowdfunding finanzieren"

Futurezone: "Filmdreh: Monochrom setzt auf Kickstarter"

APA OTS: "SIERRA ZULU: Sowjets bitten das Internet um Geld"

Salzburger Nachrichten: "Unsichtbare Verbrechen"

Laughing Squid: "Sierra Zulu, A Feature Length Political Sci-fi Dark Comedy by Monochrom"

Boing Boing: "Mutant political science fiction movie Sierra Zulu seeks kickstarting"

io9: "A Totally Demented Alternate History of a 21st Century Soviet Holdout"

Nerdcore: "Sierra Zulu: Crowdfunded SciFi-Grotesque from Austria"

Betatext: "Crowdfunding für Unterzögersdorf"

GigaOM: "Soviets, swords, comics and booze"

Libération: "Jeu des sous aux soviets zoulous"

io9: "Crowdfund a film about the last Soviet microstate, a video game about an intern on the moon, and a post-apocalyptic TV series"

Écrans: "Jeu des sous aux soviets zoulous"

Giant Freakin Robot: "Sierra Zulu Sci-Fi/Comedy Kickstarter Cast Includes Robert Picardo And Amber Benson"

Social Film Marketing: "monochrom's Sierra Zulu erzielt grandiosen Crowdfunding-Erfolg"

The Gap: "Sierra Zulu bei Kickstarter erfolgreich"

Futurezone: "Sierra Zulu: Kickstarter-Film erfolgreich"

Der Standard: "Spielfilm "Sierra Zulu" mit Crowdfunding finanziert"

Update, additional links:

Ö1: "Crowdfunding: Kunstsponsoring im Netz"

film.at: "Sierra Zulu"

The Gap: "Die Crowd auf Knopfdruck aktivieren"

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