html games by Alexi Shugan. To quote com[m]union: "Compelling array of html code games. You play, you win, you loose, without knowing exactly how and when - sort of like the game of life."
Link monochrom travel update // monochrom group participates at Grafist 8/Istanbul/Turkey (May 3rd-May 6th 2004): Grafist, International Istanbul Graphic Design Week, is an education based event, organized by Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (MSGSU) Fine Arts Faculty (GSF) Graphic Design Department since 1997. The event is endorsed by Icograda, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations. Within a week schedule, workshops, lectures exhibitions, student and teacher exchange and special events are being held. Grafist is a meeting point for internationally well known designers and educators with students and graphic design professionals from various countries.
monochrom (represented by Johannes Grenzfurthner, Günther Friesinger and Evelyn Fürlinger) will hold workshops, lectures and present an exhibition on logos. Link On the Use of Impredicative Reasoning to Construct a Class of Partial Models of ZF Within ZF: A mathematical paper by Bryan Ford. It claims that unless there's some error it follows from the exposition that ZF is inconsistent. The author is a researcher at MIT. This sensational remark is discreetly made in the conclusion. Abstract: "Goedel's incompleteness results show that if ZF is consistent, it is impossible to construct within ZF itself a single object (set) that represents a complete and precise semantic model of ZF. Nevertheless, it has also become clear since then that many kinds of partial models can be constructed within ZF that reveal interesting characteristics of ZF and related formal systems. We develop here one particular class of partial models of ZF, which rely on an extreme form of impredicative reasoning that nevertheless follow the accepted rules of set theory and first-order logic and are constructible within exactly the same variant of ZF as the one being modelled. Some study of these partial models yields interesting results."
Link Charred remains may be earliest human fires: The evidence, found by the Jordan River, dates to 790,000 years ago and is more compelling than older finds in Africa.
Link Digital Terror: New Media Art and Rhizomatic In-Securities: Article by Timothy Murray on ctheory. Quote: "In 1977, the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, argued against the conventional notion of the ontological subject by insisting on the "rapports cinématiques" between unformed elements. [...] The very machineries of scansion and tracking that exported the playful gaming of Pokemon from the children of the huge Japanese wrestlers to Western affecionados of anim now bear the traces of militaristic speeds and intensitities with which the axis of terroristic evil is tracked and traced by global forces in denial of a state of productive betweenness. As insisted by George W. Bush, you are either for us or against us. The American sponsored systems of global positioning, international digital surveillance and security provides for no in-between."
Link Fart Filter: Doctor Recommended - Flatulence Deodorizer™... Quote: "Take Back Your Life Again! No Need to Remain Trapped in Your Home! Now you can go out in public without fear of embarrassment due to the odour of excessive intestinal gas: Flatulence – caused by any reason or condition! Say Goodbye to malodorous gas – permanently! This material is proven in Gulf Combat! Lives depend on it!"
Link Borrowed Time: Interview with Michio Kaku. The theoretical physicist contemplates the plausibility of time travel. Intro: "Kaku, a string theorist, is the author of several physics books for a popular audience, including Hyperspace and Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century, and host of a weekly science radio show. He recently spoke with Scientific American.com about the possibility of time travel and his thoughts on science and popular culture."
Link Marxist overtones in three films by James Cameron: Article by James Kendrick. Quote: >There is a great irony that subverts the notable commercial success enjoyed by Titanic: The film fits comfortably into a revolutionary Marxist paradigm that condemns capitalistic excess and celebrates the heroism and humanism of the underclass. The film strongly contradicts the traditional anti-Marxist stance that there is no class structure in America, and seen together with two earlier Cameron films, Aliens (1986) and The Abyss (1989), Titanic posits a striking and meaningful critique of American capitalism that is all the more shocking when viewed in light of the film's extraordinarily high budget and immense economic success. Taken together, Titanic, The Abyss, and Aliens present a strong ideology, as defined by Stefan Morawski: "the statement or symptomatic expression of social-class attitudes, interests, or habits of thought"<
Link Kripke, Duchamp & the Standard Metre: Stuart Greenstreet isn’t quite sure how long a metre is. Are you? Intro: "In the Academy of Science, located in a suburb of Paris, a slim bar of platinum-iridium alloy is kept in its sturdy case in a temperature-controlled chamber. The precise distance between two scratches on the bar defined the Standard Metre, the basic unit of length in the metric system. How is it possible that this humdrum object could be the focus of two upheavals in the twentieth century, one in the visual arts, and the other in philosophy?"
Link monochrom web content update // A Holiday in Soviet Unterzögersdorf: We updated some pictures, links and MP3s on our "Soviet Unterzögersdorf" page. Short background info: In 2002 we faked a whole country -- "Soviet Unterzögersdorf", the last existing appanage republic of the USSR. monochrom organized a two-day holiday trip to the enclave. This site is a chronological documentation of the memorable visit.
Link Images sent directly onto the retina? A system developed by US firm Microvision projects light beams directly into the eye. (via whatever.dudecheckthisout.com)
Link Green tea polishes hard drive heads: Chemicals in green tea may provide a more effective and environmentally-friendly method for making computer hard disks. Article by Will Knight.
Link Causes of death of philosophers: Descartes? Stopped thinking. Derrida? Deconstructed. Kant? Found the means to his own end.
Link Man Found Insane, Not Guilty: A not surprising outcome, considering Harvey Derrick Glanton believed his eye had magical protective powers against the aliens who were taking over the world by converting people to chickens.
Link Erotic Gunslinger Vibrator: Make Love, Not War? Holy fuck, it's a vibrator shaped like a pistol! Interesting research object about (a) erotic pleasure and (b) niche marketing. (via Fables of the reconstruction)
Link Mika: Austrian electrogroove group Mika finally released their new website. There's an MP3 of Mika's new franco-remix "Because of you".
Link Doom as a tool for system administration: Oh my (non-existing) god, what a nice day. It is warm outside, the birds sing -- and finally I got PSDoom working. It took me over two years (!) to install it correctly.
The mapping of abstract operations to an intuitive environment is a difficult task. The only widespread example is the "desktop" interface, where files are held in "folders" which may be "opened" or "thrown away". This is a fairly good mapping, but does not solve all problems. The programmer of PSDoom is proposing a new mapping for managing system loads by creating analogies to the famous, gruesome ego shooter computer game Doom. Since people dealing with Operating Systems frequently talk about "blowing processes away", and the Unix command to destroy a process is "kill", this suggests a metaphor for process management. Each process can be a monster to be killed, and the machines can be represented by a series of rooms through which the first person shooter in the Doom gaming environment moves. "PSDoom", first released in 1999/2000, is a systemically humorous way of telling Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the "Mouse" and the "Desktop", what administrators really want. Link Rate Of Ocean Circulation Directly Linked To Abrupt Climate Change: A new study strengthens evidence that the oceans and climate are linked in an intricate dance, and that rapid climate change may be related to how vigorously ocean currents transport heat from low to high latitudes.
Link Mandolux is a collection of gorgeous desktop images designed by Mando Gomez. Pure viewing pleasure. (via DaddyD)
Link The Unrepentant Necrophile: Jim Morton interviews Karen Greenlee. She is a necrophiliac. Five years ago she made national headlines when she drove off in a hearse and wasn't heard from for two days. Instead of delivering the body to the cemetery she decided to spend some time alone with the corpse. Eventually, the police found her in the next county, overdosed on codeine Tylenol. She was charged with illegally driving a hearse and interfering with the burial (there is no law in California against necrophilia). In the casket with the body Karen left a four-and-a-half page letter confessing to amorous episodes with between twenty to forty dead men. The letter was filled with remorse over her sexual desires.
Link Virtual Autopsy: Call it virtual autopsy or virtual post-mortem examination or virtual necropsy ... anyhow ... just do it.
Link Patents on Ice: Antarctica as a last frontier for bioprospectors--and their intellectual property. Article by Gary Stix. Intro: "A patent and trademark office has yet to open its doors on McMurdo Sound or at Prydz Bay. But the microbes and fish that live in Antarctica and its environs have already become the subject of patent claims. The Spanish patent office granted a patent in 2002 for wound healing and other treatments with a glycoprotein drawn from the bacterium Pseudoalteromonas antarctica. Also that year Germany handed out a patent for a skin treatment using an extract from the green alga Prasiola crispa ssp. antarctica. And an application now before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office covers a process for producing antifreeze peptides discovered in Antarctic bacteria. [...]"
Link Manuel Gras: Austrian artist, doing weird semi-surrealistic artworks. And some fetish stuff. He uses pencil, charcoal, acryl or the airbrush and claims "to find the doorway to the collective unconsciousness". I'm not quite sure if my unconsciousness deals with radio telescopes and quasi-religious roman breastfeeding - but I think I'll visit one of his exhibitions to discuss the matter.
Link www.tallinn.info ... A hardcore heraldry flash extravaganza about Tallinn, the capital of the Republic of Estonia.
Link The Map and the Island: Today, about 2 o'clock in the morning, I left our monochrom office at the Museumsquartier Vienna. Recently a giant map of the Earth has been placed on the ground in front of the main entrance, a nice idea and mainly for tourists. Nobody was there and so I tried to jump over Australia, landed near Madagaskar, slipped and fell all over Africa and slammed on the South Atlantic at 37° West, 54.5° South, about 1,300 Km East-South-East of the Falkland Islands. Now, for the first time in my life, I spotted "South Georgia", part of the South Atlantic and Subantarctic Islands - consisting of beautiful islands such as "Inaccessible Island". The southernmost part of South Georgia, facing the Antarctic regions, is called Cape Disappointment. Now that's what I call a name.
Link Happy Birthday, Hubble: Fourteen years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit, giving us an unprecedented view of the universe. In the years since, Hubble has relayed to Earth not only valuable data, but a series of intriguing pictures of unfathomably distant starscapes.
Link Assassinations Foretold in Moby Dick: The following challenge was made by Michael "Bible Code" Drosnin: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them." (Newsweek, Jun 9, 1997)
Link Debating Ground Zero: Architects, Planners, Ideas: Commentary by Anthony Vidler. Intro: "The story of architecture’s role following the destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC) in September 2001 is on the one hand long and extremely complex, and on the other brief and simple."
Link New monochrom content // monochrom's Exhilarator: The cartoon with its sheer endless humoristic allegories is among the oldest of trades, and a creative one at that. We want to breathe new life into all those used and out-laughed witnesses of human tragedy - but how? We have asked our friend algorithmic random generator to give us a hand. We split the image from the text and shove the gag into a new interpretation (with an element of sadism, one might add).
Please, sift through your old Reader's Digests and "Best Office-Jokes 1976" books, your Hello collections and Private Eye back-issues. Warm up your scanners! Cut image from text, resizerise and jpegise! And most importantly, senderise...here. So far we have two-hundred and twenty-two equal units of both text and image at our mercy, all eagerly awaiting reorganisation. Link Attack Of The Giant Amphibians: Quote: "The 43-ft. amphibian is the Terra Wind--a motorhome made by Cool Amphibious Manufacturers International. It's not a converted anything, but a built-from-scratch custom vehicle that you can buy today. The Terra Wind sits on an all-aluminum displacement-type hull that houses the axles and running gear. A special thru-hull bearing carrier keeps the water out. For safety, the hull consists of three water-tight compartments, each with its own bilge pump and water alarm. If you prang one compartment, the remaining two will keep you afloat. Since this motorhome will never scorch the water with its 6- to 7-knot top speed, there is no point in trying to fold up the wheels to reduce drag."
Link monochrom project update // monochrom's Orkut community: Although Franky (head of monochrom's technology dept.) is sure that Orkut is Google's social/customer/demographic data collecting tool (he points out to the Orkut privacy terms), we decided to
open a monochrom community. Whatever it may be good for ... let's test it.
Link World Domination Corporation (WDC) is an international corporation who's sole purpose is controlling the world. WDC has the tools, the manpower, and the resources to achieve our mission, and in the process provide better service to 6 billion potential customers than their current governmental systems.
Link The Psychopathology Of The Rightwing Mind: Article by David Thompson. Quote: "As the U.S. election nears, Conservative websites are aglow with visions of an uninterrupted Republican future stretching out for all posterity: One world, one operating system. There is, however, another possibility. Centuries from now, assuming we survive this eerily psychotic era, Republicanism, Conservatism and the rightwing mind in general could well be regarded not as a political movement, but as a mental health issue."
Link Billions of cicadas set to plague US: Quote: "A widespread resurrection, orgies on a biblical scale, and births and deaths numbering in the billions will all soon be on display in the eastern US as a uniquely enormous population of insects known as 17-year cicadas bubble up from the ground. [...] Different broods of the insects emerge almost every year in some part of the US. But 2004's crop of red-eyed, winged insects, ominously referred to as Brood X, is special, says Michael Schauff of the Agricultural Research Service's Systematic Entomology Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland."
Link Goat Philosophy: Everything is a Goat! It's true! Everything is a Goat, and all appearance to the contrary is mere illusion. Scientists may scoff, and hide behind their hypotheses, but have all physicists since Einstein not been searching for a Grand Unified Theory? Besides, logic supersedes science just as day supersedes night and we can prove by logic that everything is a Goat.
Link NOT monopoly money: Here's something not many people will know, except for those living in Scotland (like me) or those that visit (vital tourist information here). You can get £ 1 notes in Scotland issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland. In fact, these notes "have an unusual status" because they are outlawed in England but not in Scotland. RBS just keeps printing them and punters keep on using them. So if you do come to Scotland, let's hope you happen to get one of the notes, look at them in awe and make sure you spend the notes before you leave. People beginning from Leeds down won't accept them and Banks in Europe have never even seen such a thing and might just call the police on you. (post #1 in the Scotland series)
Link The Mozart effect? Huh? I quote: "New research has revealed a molecular basis for the "Mozart effect" - the observation that a brief stint of Mozart, but not other music, may improve learning and memory. Rats that heard a Mozart sonata expressed higher levels of several genes involved in stimulating and changing the connections between brain cells, the study showed. The team, including the researcher who first proposed the Mozart effect, hope the results will help them design music therapy treatments for people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. The Mozart effect first came to light in a 1993 paper in Nature (vol 365, p 611), when Fran Rauscher, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, US, and colleagues showed that college students who listened to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major for 10 minutes performed better on a spatial reasoning test than students who listened to new age music or nothing at all."
Link Penis explodes during sex: Doctors in Romania are treating a 28-year-old whose penis exploded while he was making love to his girlfriend. (via The Firmary Blog)
Link New Case for Oldest Life on Earth: Using a method never applied to rock from ancient Earth, researchers have found possible signs of biological activity dating back nearly 3.5 billion years, earlier than any other agreed-upon discovery of life on this planet.
Link Obscenity Crackdown—What Will the Next Step Be? Eugene Volokh is a professor of law at UCLA Law School. He comments on likely outcomes of the coming war on porn. Intro: "So here's what I wonder about the Justice Department's planned new obscenity crackdown. As we know, there's lots of porn of all varieties out there on the Internet. I don't know how much of it is produced in the U.S. -- but even if it's 75 percent, and every single U.S. producer is shut down, wouldn't foreign sites happily take up the slack?"
Link 99% of us fail: If you remember yesterday's challenge and you sent something in then you perhaps feared this outcome. It's damn hard. BUT, in fact, the game is so obsessive that I played until I got all right in time. However, the person who made the swf didn't leave room for a "You win" outcome. I'm not sure if s/he's a pessimist or just a damn naughty bastard. Thanks to those, errr, the one who emailed me their answers, you know who you are.
EDIT: Got more mails. We still didn't make it, folks, but it wouldn't be wrong to suspect that no third grader would ever pass that test. We'll keep you posted on that one. EDIT 2: We made it! monochrom project update // monochrom's Blattoptera - Art for Cockroaches: We run a gallery-space for cockroaches. Every month, a different artist or arts group is invited to design an environment in which our tribe of giant South American cockroaches are placed, to act as audience for, and aesthetic judges of the work. We have a webcam to watch on the little critters.
Yesterday, Letizia Werth presented her exhibition. It is made out of dust. Letizia: "Dust is the materialisation of time, it is volatile and yet manifest. Dust is disgusting and everywhere. Dust is non-material – we don’t use it, we dispose of it. Dust is like cockroaches." We would like to remind you that the nature of the audience is such that they prefer to be in the dark. Therefore it is rather likely that the audience will refrain from showing themseves to the cameras during daytime and prefer to rest behind the pieces of art. Link Two steps back... In 1990 Australia's aboriginal population celebrated the commencement of a bold experiment. The government of Prime Minister Bob Hawke created the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), to allow Aboriginal people the right to govern their own affairs. Fourteen years later, Mr Hawke's successor, John Howard, has declared the experiment a failure and announced that aboriginal self-government in Australia is dead. Article by Greg Barns.
Link Androids and Other Undead: The Vampire as a Product of the Enlightenment: Article by Lavie Tidhar. Quote: "In this paper, I would like to take an admittedly whimsical route through the historical narrative of the Enlightenment, in order to suggest both the link between Enlightenment thinking and practices to the vampire, while briefly examining the possible links between sexual practices, the emerging genre of pornographic fictions and the vampire. In order to understand these links it is useful first to analyse the central core of the vampire myth, and see how it relates to - indeed central to - the goals of the Enlightenment."
Link Russia in Global Affairs: This is a journal that is close to Foreign Affairs, but, as the title hints, is all about Russia. A great source with an impressive list of authors. The best thing is that you can read all of their articles in full and for free.
Link Amp Minizine: Quote: "An elegant pink pamplet dedicated to the finer things in life. For chicks and dicks and... just about anybody, really."
Link Third Grade Test: I suspect that most of our readers are based in Europe. The following link is quite specific to America, but it's fun nonetheless. Could you pass third grade? Send your answers to me before Friday 12am and I'll post the scores shortly after. Only first tries count, and be honest!
Link World's Largest Saw: What do you do when a 20,000-ton car carrier capsizes in one of the world's busiest waterways? In the case of the ill-fated Tricolor, you put out an urgent call for the world's largest saw.
Link Life Stinks: Stewart Home sniffs out some links between art, farts and modernist materialism in three novels by French songwriters and litterateurs Boris Vian and Serge Gainsbourg.
Link A mammal that is the daughter of two female parents has been created for the first time.
Link 1 Link 2 Lack of Females May Have Done in Dinosaurs: An asteroid may have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago not simply by changing the world's climate, but also by causing too many of them to be born male.
Link Steve's Backyard Boxing: Steve and his buddies started having fights in his backyard and filming them. This was all before Fincher's Fight Club. Quote: "Unfortunately, no one could be told what Steve's Backyard Boxing is, it's something you have to experience for yourself. But for those of you who don't know what Steve's Backyard Boxing it's an event that occurs every other Sunday afternoon. The idea is to enjoy watching people hitting one another. The fights are not serious. There are no grudges , no anger, nor bitterness (well most the time). Steve's Backyard Boxing is just for a good time( and not in that sexual suggestive manner). As you can tell from the fights, most of us are amateurs. We're hardly professionals at this. There are some injuries (bloody noses, bite marks, total knockouts, chipped teeth, etc...) that you can expect from people hitting one another but generally it's like a glorified pillow fight. It's generally up to the people fighting to determine the seriousness of the fight. Some fight to the bitter end, some just act goofy. It's all in good fun."
Link Feral Children: Quote: "Feral children, also known as wild children or wolf children, are children who've grown up with minimal human contact, or even none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves) or somehow survived on their own. In some cases, children are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people. [...] Nearly 100 children are listed here, split into three lists: children raised by animals, isolated children: children who lived on their own, and confined children."
Link Toothing: Intro: "The mobile phone's many important uses have apparently, no limits. People sitting in the tube (underground/metro/Ubahn/sex chamber) in London are using their handys to get their leg over which is Brit-speak for sexual relations."
Link Windows and Mirrors: Jay David Bolter (Professor of New Media Studies, Georgia Institute
of Technology, Atlanta, USA) will be our guest at monochrom/Museumsquartier Vienna on April 28th. Frank Hartmann will be the host of the night's talk.
Here is a link to Jan Baetens' review of "Windows and Mirrors. Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency", the book Bolter wrote together with Diane Gromala. Link California ant 'supercolony' might not be so super after all: An ant "supercolony" in California might actually be nests of unrelated ant invaders, according to researchers who are trying to figure out how to end the insects' reign.
Link British Library: The BL has scanned some of their oldest documents and put it online. Turn the pages!
Link monochrom web content update // Me: Goucho informed us that the quicktime link on the page was broken. We republished the page. "Me" is our short film tribute to Oliver Sacks and the Knoll Brothers. Enjoy.
Link Big Bang glow hints at funnel-shaped Universe: Quote: "Could the Universe be shaped like a medieval horn? It may sound like a surrealist's dream, but according to Frank Steiner at the University of Ulm in Germany, recent observations hint that the cosmos is stretched out into a long funnel, with a narrow tube at one end flaring out into a bell. It would also mean that space is finite." (via whatever.dudecheckthisout.com)
Link Trek Tech: 40 years since the Enterprise's inception, some of its science fiction gadgets are part of everyday life. (via whatever.dudecheckthisout.com)
Link The Battle for Water: Article by Tony Clarke and Maude Barlow. Intro: "We are taught in school that the Earth has a closed hydrologic system; water is continually being recycled through rain and evaporation and none of it leaves the planet's atmosphere. Not only is there the same amount of water on the Earth today as there was at the creation of the planet, it's the same water. The next time you're walking in the rain, stop and think that some of the water falling on you ran through the blood of dinosaurs or swelled the tears of children who lived thousands of years ago. [...]"
Link Seeking the densest matter: the color glass condensate: An article by David Appell. Intro: "Physicists investigating heavy-particle collisions believe they are on the track of a universal form of matter, one common to very high energy particles ranging from protons to heavy nuclei such as uranium. Some think that this matter, called a color glass condensate, may explain new nuclear properties and the process of particle formation during collisions. Experimentalists have recently reported intriguing data that suggest a color glass condensate has actually formed in past work. [...]"
Link Neat Image: To quote devco.net: "Noise in photos is a fact of life, you cannot avoid it. Thankfully there are good post processing tools available today and also the cameras themselves has improved significantly in this area by improving the optics and CCD and also by having powerful in-camera noise reduction software. For those who aren't fortunate enough to have a good enough camera that produce noise free images there are other options like post processing. The current package that is best for removing noise is Neat Image."
Link Supermodel Personals: DaddyD sez: "I know that reading bitchy bloggers tickles my fancy 9 times out of ten. Supermodel Personals are a series of rather catty commentaries on fashion photography and models disguised as a series of personal ads. Now if only someone would do this to male models. The world might just become a better place..." (via DaddyD)
Link Theban Mapping Project: Quote: "Since its inception in 1978, the Theban Mapping Project (TMP, now based at the American University in Cairo) has been working to prepare a comprehensive archaeological database of Thebes. With its thousands of tombs and temples, Thebes is one of the world's most important archaeological zones." (via Schockwellenreiter)
Link I, Scientst: In DIY science, eBay offers amazing access to gear, supplies, chemicals - a whole universe beyond Pez dispensers. (popsci)
Link Poe, E.: Near a Raven: I quote: "The poem below [Link] was composed in 1995 and bears an uncanny similarity to a certain famous poem by Edgar Allen Poe. This is one of my longer pieces of constrained writing. Constrained writing (an old idea, but one which greatly increased in popularity in the latter half of the 20th century as a result of the work of the mostly French group Oulipo) is the art of constructing a work of prose or poetry that obeys one or more artificially-imposed rules. For example, there are two published novels from which the letter 'e' is absent - Gadsby, by Ernest Vincent Wright (1938), and La disparition by George Perec (still in print, and even available in a recent English translation (A Void, translated by Gilbert Adair) that also obeys the constraint!). Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to figure out the constraint imposed on this poem. The answer is given after the end, so if you want to try to figure it out, just look at the beginning of the poem, which is probably both necessary and sufficient to discover the rule. If you'd like a veiled hint, here's one: this poem could not have been written prior to 1947, since all the details of the rule it uses were not known before then."
Link monochrom web content update // Georg Paul Thomann: The São Paolo Biennial is well-known as one of the most important and biggest art exhibitions in the southern hemisphere. It forms a counterpart to the geographical concentration of art in the Western world. The worldwide hegemony of Western art has been maintained throughout art history, in aesthetic theory as well as on the practical side in terms of presentation and discourse. Nevertheless, we, the group monochrom, were pleased, albeit only as the national representatives of a racist mini-state, to participate in such an event.
Since February 2000 Austria has been governed by a very right-wing government. Thus the independent art curator’s selection of monochrom as Austria’s national representatives at the São Paolo Biennial 2002 was quite an interesting political statement. We decided to do a tactical-ironical project. Instead of doing an exhibition as monochrom, we decided to send Georg Paul Thomann to Brazil. Who is Georg Paul Thomann? He is a fictitious 57-year-old Austrian avant-garde artist. We wrote his complete biography (around one hundred pages) and asked fellow artists, writers and pop theorists to write articles about his life and work, which were published as the catalogue of the exhibition. It took the media quite a long time to actually figure out the whole art-avatar maneuver. The Thomann biography grew to be an amusing overview of pop, art and intellectual history during the past four decades with fictitious guest appearances from people like William Gibson, Peter Handke or Alan Jenkins. Anyway, you might like our approach - and by the way: Georg Paul Thomann saved the country of Taiwan ... Link Before the Titanic, there was the Waratah. A luxury passenger liner on her second voyage, she was coal-fired and had eight watertight compartments. They said she was unsinkable. On July 27, 1909, the Waratah was rounding South Africa, halfway through her voyage from Australia to England, when she vanished.
Link Zombie Survival Guide: Quote: "The Zombie Survival Guide is your key to survival against the hordes of undead who may be stalking you right now. Fully illustrated and exhaustively comprehensive, this book covers everything you need to know, including how to understand zombie physiology and behavior, the most effective defense tactics and weaponry, ways to outfit your home for a long siege, and how to survive and adapt in any territory or terrain."
Tremendous parody of a survival guide. And tremendously helpful, as zombies are tremendous eaters. Link onophon: Quote: "onophon is Werner Nowacek and Rainer Deutner. In May 2001 they founded their phonetic decoration text factory onophon which combines elements from literature, theatre, music and spoken word performance. Using a cappella techniques, onophon rhythmizes and improvises everyday speech patterns and submits language to pronounciation until it rhythmically refracts."
Link People everywhere are talking about "a crisis of comprehensive major exhibitions", e.g. the Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennial, etc. ... Well, I see it all quite differently. I love these Monster Truck Shows of the artworld: They've always captured the interest of the international public - regardless of whether you go there or not. And then the artists are allowed to stamp on one another and the whole world can watch and cheer them on. They run around the arena, the sweating educated middle-classes with their catalogues, greedy to catch a glimpse of the creaking metal and smashing glass, smelling the glorious fumes of petroleum. Do you appreciate the irony? You see, and it's not even intentional.
Link? No Link. Waco Resurrection: Intro: "C-level unveils Waco Resurrection, its first chapter of Endgames, a new 3D multiplayer computer game series based on alternative utopias and apocalyptic moments. [...] Revisiting the 1993 Waco, Texas episode, gamers enter the mind and form of a resurrected David Koresh through custom headgear, a voice-activated, hard-plastic 3D skin. Each player enters the network as a Koresh and must defend the Branch Davidian compound against internal intrigue, skeptical civilians, rival Koresh and the inexorable advance of government agents. Ensnared in the custom "Koresh skin", players are bombarded with a soundstream of government “psy-ops”, FBI negotiators, the voice of God and the persistent clamor of battle. Players voice messianic texts drawn from the book of revelation, wield a variety of weapons from the Mount Carmel cache and influence the behavior of both followers and opponents by radiating a charismatic aura."
Link Mark Allen's "Breathing Instructions": markallen.com > art > video > breathing instructions. Compellingly spooky.
Link Whose Democracy? Information Flows, NGOs and the Predicament of Developing States: Transcript of a speech given by Ned Rossiter. Intro: "Everyone likes to claim their organisations operate in ways that adhere to basic democratic principles. The complex of informational relations between African states, supranational entities, corporations, civilian populations and NGOs is defined by various scalar tensions that seriously undermine the constitutive dimensions of a democratic polity. Herein lies the logic of uneven modernities. This talk considers the paradoxical role played by NGOs in developing civic infrastructures, and suggests that greater focus needs to be placed by NGOs on securing intellectual property rights for developing states as the condition of political and economic sovereignty within informational and biotech economies."
Link Micromissy: Track by the Swedish musician Role Model. Gameboy 8bit beats meet Missy Elliott? Oh yes. (via DaddyD)
Link (MP3) New Blu-Ray video disk is made of paper: Quote: "A new type of Blu-Ray digital video disk made largely from paper has been developed by Sony and Toppan Printing in Japan. The two companies say such paper-based disks will be cheaper to make and less environmentally harmful."
Link Ukrainian Gulliver: a Huge Man in a Tiny Village: At age 33, Leonid Stadnik wishes he would stop growing. He's already 8 feet, 4 inches.
Link Traffic Waves: Treat traffic like a fluid. Quote: "I live in Seattle and my two daily commutes last about 45 minutes. (That's when I'm lucky; sometimes it's more like two hours each.) This has given me an immense amount of time for watching the interesting patterns in the cars. Boredom led me to fantisize about the traffic being like a flowing liquid, with cars acting as giant water molecules. Over many months I slowly realized that this was not just a fantasy. Why had I never noticed all the "traffic fluid dynamics" out there? Once my brain became sensitized to it, I started seeing quite a variety of interesting things occurring. Eventually I started using my car to poke at the flowing traffic. Observation eventually leads to experimentation, no? There are amazing things you can do as an "amateur traffic dynamicist." You can drive like an "anti-rubbernecker" and erase slowdowns created by other drivers."
Link Basics of Space Flight: Take the test, a good waste of spare time. Quote: "The Basics of Space Flight (BSF) is a training module designed primarily to help JPL operations people identify the range of concepts associated with deep space missions, and grasp the relationships these concepts exhibit."
Link Gender and Visual Thesaurus: Liz (misbehaving.net) writes: "A lot of people have been sending me the link to the Visual Thesaurus lately, and it's picking up a lot of links in del.icio.us, as well. It's visually quite striking. The first person who sent this to me, however, was my mother. And she suggested that I start by looking up the word "woman." So I did. You should, too. (I'll wait.) [...]"
Link What the World Needs Now Is DDT: Abiola writes about malaria and the ban of DDT. Quote: "I have news for those who'd put the welfare of wild animals ahead of that of their fellow human beings - Africa isn't just a gigantic game reserve, to be pristinely maintained for the benefit of filming documentaries to keep you suitably entertained. [...] Millions shouldn't have to die for the sake of an environmentalism that has become an ersatz religion for many comfortable westerners."
Link 1 Link 2 Migrating Birds Rely on Sunsets: US scientists believe they have made an important breakthrough in the mystery of how migrating birds manage to navigate thousands of kilometres and arrive at exactly the same spot each year.
Link The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003: A commented list by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman. Quote: "The year 2003 was not a year of garden variety corporate wrongdoing. The sheer variety, reach, and intricacy of corporate schemes, scandal, and crimes were spellbinding. Not an easy year to pick the ten worst companies, but Multinational Monitor wasn’t deterred by such complications. So here, in alphabetical order, is our list of the ten worst corporations of 2003."
Link Abortion TV: Greta Garbage (author of "That’s Disgusting!") points out this revolting site: "Adopts the plainly ridiculous stance that it’s about educating people. Truly horrific pro-life bullshit."
Link Coded Cultures: Call For Works And Papers: Quote: "From May 16 until May 30 the Congress >CODED CULTURES< will take place in the >Freiraum< of MuseumsQuartier Vienna in Austria. For two weeks the ways of origination and reality design of various artists and art groups shall be demonstrated on hand of workshops and an exhibition, whereas a new approach towards digital art in the 21st century will be acquired beyond its technical background. 5uper.net asks for submissions of artists and theoreticians which work in the field of electronic, digital - as well as computer based arts. Due to low budget we are only able to offer the artist and speakers accomodation - sponsoring of any kind is very welcome."
Link The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age: Article by Camille Paglia. Quote: "Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on tv and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. Technology, like Kubrick’s rogue computer, HAL, is the companionable servant turned ruthless master. The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today’s students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions ... but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. Without that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images."
Link Comment: Tom Updike really likes the article but points out that it spreads some subliminal forms of cultural pessimism. He recommends "Cultural Pessimism: Narratives Of Decline In The Postmodern World" by Oliver Bennett. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: James Bowman of the American Spectator has an interpretive review of the latest Kaufman film, suggesting that "All the science of this film’s science fiction is really there just to allow Joel and Clementine this moment of insight which, had we sufficient moral imagination, we all might share without any help from Dr. Mierzwiak and his black arts.... Here, in short, is a sort of playing God that is not just OK but is morality’s highest achievement."
Link Arthur Paul Pedrick: Pedrick was an extremely prolific British inventor in the 1960s and 1970s. Bursting with ideas, he clearly felt he had to share them with the world. After a career as an examiner in the UK Patent Office, he spent his retirement applying for large numbers of patents. The practicality of his ideas never seems to have troubled him, as these examples show.
Link Broccoli v President: I like doing research when you get distracted by things like this: Question: Did President George Bush, President George W. Bush's father, really hate broccoli so much he took it off the White House menu? Find the official answer below. (I think it's cute)
Link Gentlemen's Blood: Barbara Holland guides us lightheartedly through the touchy subject of honor—and how to defend it—in this compulsively readable history of dueling's first thousand years.
Link (excerpt) Link (Amazon) The Controversy Over Stem Cell Research and Medical Cloning: Tracking the Rise and Fall of Science in the Public Eye. Report by Matthew Nisbet on csicop.org
Link The First Nanochips: As scientists and engineers continue to push back the limits of chipmaking technology, they have quietly entered into the nanometer realm. Article by By G. Dan Hutcheson.
Link Music of the Holocaust: This collection of songs written in Jewish ghettos, concentration camps and partisan outposts during the Nazi era demonstrates how music acted to preserve a sense of humanity for those living under inhumane conditions. The pages include audio files of the songs, links to further reading, photos, and in some cases, sheet music.
Link Memory bottleneck limits intelligence: Quote: "The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain."
Link rebel:art #1 is out: The first international magazine about the avant-garde of modern political art.
Order Link Heaven and hell: Far from Tehran's morality squads, women take to the skies - with paragliders. A report by Hengameh Golestan.
Link Audio Content: As DaddyD reports, all of these sites offer musical and audio content for free download and open use: >>Common Content is a sort of clearing house of content that has used the creative commons license. It is a particularly friendly agreement that allows the use of material for remixing and similar purposes. You can find more information about CC licenses there as well. It's a great starting point. // Samplenet is a collection of loops, break beats and samples that are copyright free. They don't cost anything to download either. // Opsound is an online record label whose artists also use the Creative Commons license. The site offers downloads of complete tracks by the artists as well as links to the artists for people who are interested in remixing tracks available. Some artists have made individual tracks and loops available and others will do so upon request. Just check it out and dig around a little.<< (Via DaddyD)
Information And Communication Technology: Achievements And Prospects: Let's make a short time travel to 1993. That's what I call optimism! (Thanx, readymade2002)
Link His plasma. Her living room. A perfect marriage: "VisionArt® allows state-of-the-art home theater into the living room by concealing wall-mounted plasma television screens behind elegantly framed Giclee Limited Edition Fine Art Prints on motorized, retracting canvas." There's no accounting for taste.
Link Why Was There Only One Japan? Article by Mordechai Ben-Ari. Intro: "According to Jared Diamond's popular book Guns, Germs and Steel, human history was more or less predetermined by environmental factors. While Diamond's argument is clearly argued and supported by a vast amount of scientific evidence, and while he does give some lip-service to the importance of cultural and personal factors (Diamond, 1998, pp. 417–420), I believe that these factors are more important than he allows. Let me start my argument with the description of an historical incident. [...]"
Link Fantasy Coffins: Craftsmen from Ghana make these .. uhm ... interesting ... coffins. Want to be buried in something that looks like a fish? Or a car?
Link Forget, Memory: The Whys of the Oubliette Film: Recent popular films on memory loss raise the question of whether it’s something to fear—or enjoy.
Link Upcoming monochrom project // Roböxotica 2004 / Call for Papers and Robots: monochrom and Shifz are organizing the first and inevitably leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics (here in Vienna/Austria). We try to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. There is an Annual Cocktail Robot Award for 1. serving cocktails, 2. mixing cocktails, 3. bartending conversation, 4. lighting cigars/cigarettes, 5. other achievements in the sector of cocktail culture. And as you can imagine ... these tasks aren't trivial. If you are interested in coming to Vienna to present a robot, hold a workshop or a lecture, please send me an email.
Link Value chain envy: Explaining new entry and vertical integration in popular music: Abstract: "The desirability of establishing a value chain at a particular stage in a value system can be considered to depend on the relation between the value that can be created and the value that can be captured at that particular stage. Value chain envy motivates firms to invade the more desirable stages of the value system, either through new entry or vertical integration. The feasibility of establishing a value chain, however, can be considered to depend on the efficacy of the means to value protection at that particular stage. The concepts of value creation, capture, and protection within value systems are employed to analyze recent developments in the recorded music industries, particularly those affecting the stage of qmusic publishing. Over the course of the 20th century the value created at the stage of music publishing diminished steadily, while the value captured remained high, thereby giving rise to value chain envy. On the basis of the proposed theoretical framework one could expect these developments to trigger strategic responses to remedy this value chain envy. However, most actors, except the major record companies, were unable to do so until new information communication technologies were introduced. Industry level data do indeed corroborate that vertical integration by major record companies was followed, from the mid-1990s onwards, by a significant increase in the prevalence rate of newly founded SMEs in the music publishing industry in the Netherlands. These newly founded firms are testimony to new entry or vertical integration by musician-entrepreneurs, thereby providing support for the advanced arguments."
Link New monochrom content // monochrom's Seasonal Aestheticizings: Paschal Duct-Taping To The Viennese Mausoleum Of Modern Art (April 6th 2004).
Link New monochrom content // Display, Retry, Fail: Cinemas are exciting. Things crash and bump. Bolts and fists are flying. It bangs and kabooms. People go to the cinemas in order to experience something. But... has cinema been outdated by digital technology?
Link Bombs and Bytes: Can the intense economy of information short-circuit knowledge? Anustup Basu follows Gilles Deleuze in analysing fascism as a hijacking of linguistic potential. Facsism, he argues, realises itself through a technology of habituation parasitic on our willingness to be informed – a biopolitical sovereignty that percolates individuals and communities at the micro-level. No longer is world-order decreed by the word of the sovereign, but by an inhuman sovereign will constituted on the plane of information.
Link Free market, branded imagination — Harry Potter and the commercialization of
children's culture: Article by Jyotsna Kapur. Intro: "Just when it seemed that magic had become passé even in its last home, i.e., children’s culture, along came J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. (Chris Columbus, 2001). After all, children’s mass culture in the late twentieth century had derived a great deal of merriment ridiculing the idea of magic as the old fashioned ingredient of nineteenth century children’s tales. They were now simply too tame and, should we say, childish, for a generation that had cut its teeth on video games and marketing campaigns designed to address them as a niche market. [...]"
Link Deja Vu Web: The Browser Emulator simply recreates the experience of web surfing as it began. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was ascii encoded, typically displayed in monochrome courier on a black screen. In 1992 the time of the "Web" began. "Deja Vu Web" is a scientifically nostalgic look at the browsers of the early 1990ies and how they changed over time. Long time web users will get a kick out of revisiting the old web, complete with line-mode browser, NCSA mosaic, and the original Netscape Navigator.
Idea and implementation by Swedish designer Pär Lannerö.
Link Free Play: The politics of the video game: Kevin Parker's article on the implicit ideology in video games. Intro: "In 1979 kids and their quarters descended on convenience stores and shopping malls to experience the latest in digital entertainment: breaking rocks. The video game Asteroids boasted that its "explosions, laser blasts, [and] fragmentation of space debris" were "realistic," and by the standards of the day they were. A quarter century later, as you’d expect, game pyrotechnics are much more advanced. But so is something that was harder to predict. Arcade action is being upstaged by social simulation." (via TerraNova)
Link One man's family plan: Quote: “The basic plan: 2-6 women to have 2-15 children by me… The preferred situation tends toward the higher numbers.”
Detailed info here ... Link Christ on a Merry-Go-Round: The Passion of the Christ, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Monty Python's Life of Brian: Mary Ann Johanson's excellent comment on Mel Gibson's Jesus flick.
Link Help wanted for monochrom project // Call for JPEGs: Cartoons often consist of two parts ... the graphical element and the text below the drawing (example). We need around 300 such text elements, ... only the text elements. We need JPEGs, maximum width 300 px. Please send the files as attachments. Thanx a lot in advance! We'll keep you updated!
Email Link Problem-solving: Narratives and Algorithms: A philosophical approach by Herbert Hrachovec. Intro: "We can describe a problem-space as opening up through the absence of an answer and as being held together by the expectation that some answer can be found and decided upon. Notice the crucial distinction between an answer and some answer, i.e. between the general lack of satisfaction that marks a problem before it is clearly articulated and the specific result that only takes shape during the process of problem-solving. Successful problem-solving calls for arriving at some settlement between the two. In what follows I want to elaborate on these remarks, to sharpen the focus on what can pass as a solution to a problem and in particular to locate the concept of an algorithmic procedure in such a context."
Link Interplanetary telecommunication needs an upgrade. That's the aim of the Interplanetary Internet, an effort to extend the capabilities of cyberspace to outer space. And while a ".mars" address is quite a few years off, the latest InterPlaNet research may have a dramatic impact on Earth-based connectivity as well. Article by David Pescovitz.
Link Harvard English Dialect Survey: The Dialect Survey used a series of questions, including rhyming word pairs and vocabulary words, to explore words and sounds in the English language. The data collection phase of the Dialect Survey is complete. The results are presented in form of dialect maps, displaying what terms and pronunciations are used, and where they are used. Enjoy.
Link Fallen Stars: Tragic Lives & Lost Careers. A book by Julian Upton. "Fallen Stars" probes the underside of fame to reveal a host of glittering careers stunted by ill-health, alcoholism, drug addiction and egomania. Twenty-one tales of stardom turned sour, these are the tragic final years of some of the world’s best-loved actors and comedians, a latter-day Hollywood Babylon that includes Benny Hill, Diana Dors, Peter Sellers, Carry On legends and many others.
Link Ars Electronica 2004 is on its way. In fact, Ars Electronica is boring. But boredom is the only thing that lets you experience time, isn't it? Anyway, as the thing that it is, a new funnel that continually demands to be filled with old wine. Maybe boredom is an emancipating way to experience time: what outer space is to architectural space. No now, no later – emancipation from plans, from agenda, from the false projections of possible events that never occur anyway. That would mean that boredom makes something genuinely new possible in the first place. On the other hand, the web is boring, and how often have you really seen anything new, except the Japanese cat bred in a jar.
Link What happens when lightning strikes an airplane? Edward J. Rupke, senior engineer at Lightning Technologies, Inc., (LTI) in Pittsfield, Mass., provides an explanation.
Link Art Prostitute: Nice magazine with damn fine navigation on its website.
Link
Where Did Noah Park the Ark? Ed Davis of Albuquerque was one of the few who, before his death in 1998 at age 95, claimed to have seen the ark.
Link cheesygifts4teachers: A shrine dedicated to exhibiting all those wonderful gifts which the dear little children give to their school teachers as birthday or Christmas presents, or at the end of the year, or just because they love them!
Link The big bang on your TV: Not sure if this is common knowledge, but it was certainly new to me. All Sagan-ites like Johannes will perhaps chuckle at my being sooo late.... ;)
Here goes: "Cosmologically speaking, the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) is the oldest light in the Universe and provides an opportunity to directly measure the characteristics of the young Universe." The cool thing is that you can pick up CMB - and watch it - on your TV: "CMB photons account for about 99% of all photons that exist, and fill all of space at a density of about 400 CMB photons per cubic centimetre. Every second some 10 million million photons per square centimetre pass a given point in space. Even your TV aerial is a crude CMB detector, with a few percent of TV “snow” being due to CMB photons". Read more here: Link The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art: Article by Lev Manovich. Quote: "Since Descartes introduced the system for quantifying space in the seventeenth century, graphical representation of functions has been the cornerstone of modern mathematics (if you need to remember how it works and you have a Mac, start Graphing Calculator and run the demo.) In the last few decades, the use of computers for visualization enabled development of a number of new scientific paradigms such as chaos and complexity theories, and artificial life. It also forms the basis of a new field of scientific visualization. Modern medicine relies on visualization of body and its functioning; modern biology similarly is dependent on visualization of DNA and proteins. But while contemporary pure and applied sciences, from mathematics and physics to biology and medicine heavily relies on data visualization, in the cultural sphere visualization until recently has been used on a much more limited scale, being confined to 2D graphs and charts in the financial section of a newspaper, or on occasional 3D visualization on television to illustrate the trajectory of a space station or of a missile."
Link (Word doc) Diet of worms can cure bowel disease: Quote: "Regular doses of worms really do rid people of inflammatory bowel disease. The first trials of the treatment have been a success, and a drinkable concoction containing thousands of pig whipworm eggs could soon be launched in Europe."
Link Petrarch - the poet who lost his head: Scientists who have been examining what they thought were Petrarch's remains have discovered that the skull belongs to someone else. And they suspect it could be that of a woman.
Link Hamburger Eyes: Super duper photo-zine. I don't order much on the net, but issue #6 was one of them.
Link The View from Mount Zapffe: Gisle Tangenes describes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist - Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899-1990). [Gisle R. Tangenes is soon to graduate in Philosophy from the University of Oslo. He is too pessimistic even for mountaineering.]
Link Biroweb: "Biroweb", as DaddyD comments, "is pixel free. Well I guess you could say no pixels were harmed during the creation of the illustrations. They are all analog, all biro, and all good. I don't know if they are funny though. Should they be? I guess I find them more cheeky. Now if I could just find someone to call a cheeky monkey.... That would make my day."
Link Viagra: Using standard spammer substitution-techniques on the word "viagra" yields 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 possibilities: Viagorea ViagDrHa V l a g r a VyAGRA via---gra viagrga via-gra 'V 1 @ G' Ra Viagzra viagdra via_gra ViaZUgra Viargvra ViagrYa Vii-agra ViagWra vi(@)gr@ Viagvra V-I-A-G-R-A Vi-ag.ra vigra Vkiagra via.gra v-ii-a=g-ra V l A G R A VIA7GRA V/i/a/g/r/a VIxAGRA Viaggra vi@gr|@| ViaTagra ViaVErga Viagr(a Viagr^a Viágrá Viagara Viag@ra Viag&ra vi@g*r@ V-i.a-g*r-a V1@grA ViaaPrga Vi$agra ViaJ1gra Viag$ra via---gra Vi.ag.ra Viaoygra Vi/agra Viag%ra Viarga V|i|a|g|r|a Viag)ra vi@|g|r@ Viag&ra vi**agra vi@gr*@ vi-@gr@ V iagr a V&iagra. (via Kottke)
The Cartoon and Caricature archive: This is magnificent. The Centre for the study of Cartoons and Caricature at Kent University features an extensive online database. You have to register for it, but it's free and it makes sense. Once you've done that you can search for whatever you want (topic or names) and off you go. A bit like a google img-search but much more rewarding. I've once spent an entire afternoon on it, so it's well worth bookmarking. Direct link to the archive:
Link Why dreamers are tickled pink: Dr. Blagrove uses a specially-constructed tickling machine at the University of Wales, Swansea, to investigate the nature of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and dreaming.
Link Romanian villagers decry police investigation into vampire slaying: Quote: "Before Toma Petre's relatives pulled his body from the grave, ripped out his heart, burned it to ashes, mixed it with water and drank it, he hadn't been in the news much. That's often the way here with vampires. Quiet lives, active deaths."
Link Draining the Language out of Color: Words mold many aspects of thought, says linguist Paul Kay, but not all aspects. The proof lies in the names the world's languages give to colors.
Link GAO Says Army on Road to Ruin. By Noah Shachtman. Quote: "It's been called the most ambitious military effort since the Manhattan Project, and the centerpiece of Donald Rumsfeld's plans to overhaul America's armed forces: a $92 billion push to change almost everything about the Army by 2010, from the guns GIs carry, to the officers they salute, to the tanks they drive. A new congressional report is alleging that the Future Combat Systems program is poised for major delays and a financial train wreck. Worst of all, the report claims, the Army knew this was going to happen all along."
Link Snow Business: Snow and Winter Effects for Motion Pictures and TV? Of course! "Welcome to Snow Business, the worldwide experts in winter effects for the motion picture, television and entertainment industries."
Link New monochrom content // Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere: My essay on the cultural history of "Amok". Intro: "Every day, the snuff picture sites on the internet display pictures of people, and sometimes animals, who died in the most unusual circumstances. In this gigantic photo depot I also discovered an image of the remains of the head of an American who, after a short morning visit to his office, left his workplace in order to leave a trail of carnage at a nearby supermarket and finally to kill himself. Somehow the police photo landed on the website, and below it was a commentary unobtrusively written in Times New Roman font: “Maybe his inkjet printer had a paper jam.” Who knows? In office space no one can hear you scream. [...]"
Link Best Viewed Without a Browser: Aaron S. Lav believes that the best way to read HTML documents is without a browser: users should connect to the appropriate port, and then display the raw HTML at 30, 120, or 240 characters per second. At such speeds, subtle nuances of pacing can be appreciated; with traditional all-at-once rendering, such nuances are thrown away. Also, semantically different tags, such as /cite/ and /em/ are easily distinguished without an interfering browser to render them both as italic. Lav deplores the fact that few designers today care about such nuances and he therefore wants everybody to join the "Best Viewed Without a Browser" campaign today and make their voices heard! (Um, figuratively speaking.)
Link Appetite may be hard-wired: David Kramer reports: "For those who struggle to lose weight, the problem might lie in their brains, not their stomachs. Researchers have found that our natural appetite could be built into our brains just after birth, and may then be set for the rest of our lives."
Link "People Doing Strange Things With Software": Quote: "You are cordially invited to leave your tents and sleeping bags safely at home and join us in Aarhus, Denmark for the Runme Dorkbot citycamp
2004. From the 25th-27th August, Aarhus will be filled with 'people doing strange things with software', as well as more traditional campfire activities such as eating, drinking, talking, socialising, showing off and relaxing together. The citycamp will be an informal gathering of people interested in software and art where citycampers will be free to do some low-key research, develop code and ideas, talk to interesting people and enjoy dorkbot-style presentations (5-20 minute presentations with feedback sessions), performances and parties."
Link Quake as Infocom text adventure: Nice fake. Quote: "IF games, if you've never seen one, are text adventures. Basically they're interactive novels. IF has a long and glorious history in the gaming industry, and the genre has produced lots of classics, most notably the Infocom library of games, which include the Zork series, The Lurking Horror, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Suspended, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and more. IF Quake acts as a bridge between the Quake engine and a Z-Machine interpreter of your choice, converting the maps and NPCs you encounter in the game into straight, readable text. In IF Quake, you walk through the exact same levels you do in the graphical version of the game, only instead of circle-strafing and firing at your enemies, you type commands like "ATTACK GRUNT WITH SHOTGUN".
IF Quake is a radical departure from the normal Quake experience, and it's been a great deal of fun for me to work on." Link [The Archives] 
. . . . . |
. . 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] Booking monochrom: [Europe] [USA] External monochrom links: [monochrom Wikipedia] [monochrom Flickr] [monochrom blip.tv] [monochrom GV] [monochrom Youtube] [monochrom Facebook] [monochrom iTunes] [monochrom Twitter] 
[ P r o j e c t s ] Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 2 / The Adventure Game Krach der Roboter: Hello World! Slacking is killing the DIY industry (T-Shirt) Carefully Selected Moments / CD, LP Freedom is a whore of a word (T-Shirt) International Year of Polytheism 2007 Santa Claus Vs. Christkindl: A Mobster Battle Kiki and Bubu and The Shift / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Privilege / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Self / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Good Plan / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Feelings / Short film / Short film Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 1 / The Adventure Game I was a copyright infringement in a previous life (T-Shirt) Firing Squad Euro2008 Intervention I can count every star in the heavens above -- The image of computers in popular music All Tomorrow's Condensations / Puppet show The Redro Loitzl Story / Short film Law and Second Order (T-Shirt) They really kicked you out of the Situationist International? When I was asked to write about new economy Arse Elektronika 2007, 2008, 2009 etc. The Void's Foaming Ebb / Short film The Charcoal Burner / Short film Fieldrecording in Sankt Wechselberg / Short film Campaign For The Abolition Of Personal Pronouns Entertainment (Unterhaltung) / Short film Nicholas Negroponte Memorial Cable Experience the Experience! (West Coast USA/Canada Tour 2005) A Holiday in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Metroblogging Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere 452 x 157 cm² global durability Blattoptera / Art for Cockroaches An attempt to emulate an attempt The Department for Criticism against Globalisation Disney vs. Chrusov / Short film Turning Threshold Countries Into Plows Roböxotica // Festival for Cocktail-Robotics Cracked Foundation For The Fine Arts Oh my God, they use a history which repeats itself! (T-Shirt) Administrating:  . . . . . |
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