The organizers of last week's "cocktail robotics" festival in Vienna, Austria, the annual "Roboexotica" event, have posted the audio from the lectures in German and English. I gave a talk there called "A Singular Metaphor" in which I tried to delve into the reason that the idea of uploading our minds is so attractive right now. Sean Bonner had a fun talk on user power on sites like Digg called "The inmates have taken over the asylum...," while Jens Ohlig from the Chaos Computer Club proposed that robots should create all literature, David Fine pondered consciousness, and Make Magazine's Bre Pettis gave a talk called "Machines: If you can't beat them, join them," about the utopia of apocalypse.
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]