The tide is full: By Michael Griffin. Intro: "With Eurostar charging £190 for a six-hour day-trip to Brussels, where I briefly had business, I cast back to simpler times when there was more choice in how one travelled to what was then called 'The Continent', and speed was of less concern. In those days, you reserved a day for the trip from Charing Cross to Dover and the cross-Channel ferry forward to your destination on the other side. My immediate concern was whether it would be cheaper to go solo through roads our grandfathers took to Flanders, rather than pay the exorbitant price demanded by Eurostar, a bankrupt company that has secured a near-monopoly on land-based travel from London to Paris, Brussels and Lille. Opinions of Eurostar have changed since the service was launched 12 years ago this November. Those who use it tend to approve of it and, in so doing, participate in the EU vision of a first-class Europe free of borders, of seamless travel and windows on the world that do not open. To that extent, it is a medium with a distinctive message. Eurostar carved new roads through virgin landscapes in France and Belgium that were unencumbered by the brown-field sites that steam travel encouraged - and which are a mortification for the new Europe's image of itself. A Eurostar ride to Brussels became a revelatory exploration of a misty, fictional utopia, though a 'state' journey through the rusting steel mills along the River Meuse arguably provides a more acute snapshot of people’s lives in contemporary Belgium." Link
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]
