Gay Muslim Film Could Spark Protests: A new documentary exploring the lives of gay Muslims could soon set off another round of violent protests in the Middle East.
Link The Tech Behind Oscar Night: It takes a lot of miles of cable and some fancy coordination to make Oscar night work.
Link monochrom info // "Speisestelle": Video blog feature about our free open wifi point (next to our office at Museumsquartier/Vienna).
 Link Going cheap: TVs and DVD players cost 45% less, in real terms, than they did a decade ago; in the same period, the price of computers has fallen by 93%. High street prices have never been so low, but what kind of consumers do we become when we can buy a handbag for £3 - and then chuck it away? How the bargain boom changed the way Britain shops.
Link monochrom info // monochrom conclave: We had our monochrom project conclave (February 23-26, 2006) at the Tirolhof in Peyerbach, Lower Austria. Here's a breakfast picture (click to enlarge).
 Left to right: Harald Homolka List, Roland Gratzer, Franz Ablinger, Daniel Fabry, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Anika Kronberger, Evelyn Fürlinger, Günther Friesinger, Frank Apunkt Schneider. Butterflies poke holes in DNA barcodes: Mixing subspecies cause problems for genetic fingerprinting scheme.
Link Bacteria Turns Styrofoam into Biodegradable Plastic:
 Bacteria are everywhere, silently going about their business of breaking down cellulose, fermenting foods or fixing nitrogen in the soil, among a host of other activities. Given their ubiquity and diversity of functions, biotechnologists have been searching for new uses for different strains of the microscopic organisms, such as consuming oil spills or even capturing images. Now biologists at the University College Dublin in Ireland have found that a strain of Pseudomonas putida can exist quite happily on a diet of pure styrene oil--the oil remnant of superheated Styrofoam--and, in the process, turn the environmental problem into a useful, biodegradable plastic. Link What Does Islam Look Like? In much the same way that conventional wisdom in the Arab world tends to view "America" as a monolithic place speaking with a single, domineering voice, Westerners have begun to discuss "the Islamic world" as if such a thing could really be reduced to a simple set of ideas and actions. By extension, "Islamic art" is often seen as monolithic and single-minded, when the truth is far more complex. "It's a political story, an ancient and universal one, about how an image, and almost any image will do, once it is fused to cultural identity — Islam, in this case — can end up being used as a weapon."
Link Leslie Caron's 'Lili' and the first emoticon: Quote: >>The earliest known appearance of the "smiley" emoticon, :-), was in an ad for this film in the New York Herald Tribune on 10 March 1953, page 20, columns 4-6. The film opened nationwide, and this ad possibly ran in many newspapers. It read: Today You'll laugh :-) You'll cry :-( You'll love <3 'Lili'" This should not be confused with the graphical yellow "smiley face", which was first drawn by Harvey Ball some 10 years later.<<
Link Better bone dates reveal bad news for Neanderthals: Modern humans took over Europe in just 5,000 years.
Link What Are We Losing In Iraq's Destructive Chaos? Quote: "As the first images of a massive destruction at one of Iraq's holiest shrines began coming in yesterday, it was hard not to think of the building, rather than what it stands for. How old was it? What was the architecture like? Was this another loss, like the Bamiyan Buddhas, needlessly destroyed by the Taliban? Is its destruction equivalent, say, to the bombing of St. Peter's in Rome, or Chartres Cathedral? The mind grasps for an easy equivalence... Unlike so many images of terrorist destruction, the calculated demolition of the shrine in Samarra captures the 'was' and 'is' with rare power."
Link The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
 1BOMB1TARGET vs HARD OFF - split (hirntrust grind media) BIG NURSE - who wants to kill the president (high density headache) TOM BROSSEAU - empty houses are lonely (Fat Cat) DROWSY - snow on moss on stone (Fat Cat) FALLTIME - coma (fire walk with me) GARDENBOX - last resort (venerate industries) KNUT - terraformer (conspiracy) MONNO - error (conspiracy) SHORA - malval (conspiracy) VAN JOHNSONS - ladies and gentlemen ... (firewalkwithme) careful, lots of heavy load this time.. Emergency Biennale in Chechnya: Artworks by international artists that clandestinely reach Chechnya in suitcases, and double of the artworks that travel around the world : in this consists the Emergency Biennale in Chechnya which was launched on 23 February 2005, respectively in Grozny (different points in the city) and in Paris, at Palais de Tokyo, Site de Création Contemporaine (23 February / 20 April 2005).
Wishing to reintroduce Chechnya to an international audience while reacting to the phenomenon of proliferation of the international Biennales, Emergency Biennale in Chechnya has been conceived in a geopolitical context which has become so complex that it seemed urgent and necessary to mobilize the artists.
The mobilization lasted for a week (around January 26, 2005), and the artists were requested to create works likely to fit in a suitcase, and to provide two copies of the work so that the Emergency Biennale in Chechnya could be shown around the world and mirror the one in Grozny.
Link
Carnival in Rio with Arnold Schwarzenegger (1983): What the hell? Is this a sex tourism TV commercial?
 (Thanx, Boris Kamenik) Link Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system: Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.
Tor aims to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers called onion routers, protecting you from websites that build profiles of your interests, local eavesdroppers that read your data or learn what sites you visit, and even the onion routers themselves." Link Slime Powered Robot: A bright yellow slime mould that can grow to several metres in diameter has been put in charge of a scrabbling, six-legged robot. The Physarum polycephalum slime, which naturally shies away from light, controls the robot's movement so that it too keeps out of light and seeks out dark places in which to hide itself. Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University of Southampton, UK, who developed the slime-controlled bot with colleagues from Kobe University in south-central Japan, says the idea is to find simpler ways to control a robot’s behaviour.
Link How To Survive A Robot Uprising: If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace. In print and on the big screen we have been deluged with scenarios of robot malfunction, misuse, and outright rebellion. Robots have descended on us from outer space, escaped from top-secret laboratories, and even traveled back in time to destroy us.
 Today, scientists are working hard to bring these artificial creations to life. In Japan, fuzzy little real robots are delivering much appreciated hug therapy to the elderly. Children are frolicking with smiling robot toys. It all seems so innocuous. And yet how could so many Hollywood scripts be wrong? Link Did early humans socialise to avoid getting eaten? Simulations provide more evidence that hominids may have adapted cooperative behaviours to avoid being eaten by other animals.
Link Extreme weather 'blighting buildings and beauty spots': Britain's heritage is being endangered by climate change, the National Trust has warned, as extremes of wet and dry weather take their toll on buildings and beauty spots.
Link Seven Wonders Of The Modern World: What would they be? Quote: "In the past few years, voters nominated a number of manmade sites, and the 77 top vote-getters advanced. They were narrowed to 21 in January by a panel of world-famous architects (seven of them). Results will be announced Jan. 1, 2007. The only remaining U.S. site in the top 21 is the Statue of Liberty, though at least the Golden Gate Bridge, Empire State Building and Mount Rushmore made the list of 77 finalists. Even so, it's an interesting glimpse at which of humankind's architectural accomplishments still have the power to inspire."
Link 26 feet of excrement: Quote: "In February 1995, working in conjunction with nutritionists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, I adopted a super fiber-rich diet which allowed me to successfully produce a single extruded excrement the exact length of my colon: 26 feet. I documented the extrusion at the Cranbrook-Kingswood High School Bowling Alley, Bloomfield Hills, MI, which offered a length of floor suitable for the process and measuring the results. The cathartic diet was supplemented by a high intake of Metamucil fiber substance. The weeklong endurance prior to the event was ensured by the employment of a plug specifically designed to curtail any premature excretions."
Link Scientists are split on the different ways men and women think: If 60% of biology students are female, why do only 10% go on to become professors?
Link Burying the Lancet Report: Over a year ago an international team of epidemiologists, headed by Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, completed a "cluster sample survey" of civilian casualties in Iraq. Its findings contradicted central elements of what politicians and journalists had presented to the U.S. public and the world.
Link Photos of the First Few Microseconds of an Atomic Blast: Quote: "Ever wondered what an atomic blast looks like before it obliterates everything around it? Before the smoke, the mushroom cloud, the devastation, it's really quite amazing to see the first few fractions of an atomic bomb upon detonation. Edgerton built a special lens 10 feet long for his camera which was set up in a bunker 7 miles from the source of the blast which was triggered Nevada - the bomb placed atop a steel gantry anchored to the desert floor by guide wires. The exposures are at 1/100,000,000ths of a second. Due to the extremely high shutter speeds, the image quality and color depth is limited in these photos."
 (via Carlos Katastrofsky) Link There's something fishy about human brain evolution: Quote: "Forget the textbook story about tool use and language sparking the dramatic evolutionary growth of the human brain. Instead, imagine ancient hominid children chasing frogs. Not for fun, but for food. According to Dr. Stephen Cunnane it was a rich and secure shore-based diet that fuelled and provided the essential nutrients to make our brains what they are today. Controversially, according to Dr. Cunnane our initial brain boost didn't happen by adaptation, but by exaptation, or chance."
Link Math So Complex It Can't Be Proved: Mathematical proofs are getting so complex, they're becoming difficult to verify. Quote: "I think that we're now inescapably in an age where the large statements of mathematics are so complex that we may never know for sure whether they're true or false. That puts us in the same boat as all the other scientists."
Link Scotland is the Centre of a Gravity Revolution: One of the basic tenets of astronomy - the universal force of gravity - is now under serious challenge from a radical, competing theory which in the words of one observer threatens to "open Pandora's Box".
Link Operating-room opiates may get surgeons hooked: Exposure to airborne drugs could increase a doctor's chance of becoming an addict.
Link Plagued by teenagers? Try anti-teenie sounds!
 Quote: "As a form of revenge against disruptive youth, it is almost too sweet - a device that annoys teenagers so intensely they have to disperse and loiter somewhere else. Police have given their backing to a gadget that sends out an ultra high-pitched noise that can be heard only by those under 20 and is so distressing it forces them to clutch their ears in discomfort. But because the body's natural ability to detect some frequency wave bands diminishes almost entirely after 20, adults are completely immune to the sounds. The Sonic Teenager Deterrent, nicknamed the Mosquito because of its sound, has proved so successful in warding off gangs from trouble-spots that it has been endorsed by the police and local authorities." Link New Kind of Star Found: An international team of astronomers has discovered a new class of stars--massively compressed old neutron stars that seem inactive but for intermittent bursts of radio waves. Dubbing them rotating radio transients (RRATs), the researchers note that their isolated outbursts last for as few as two milliseconds and are separated by gaps as long as three hours.
Link Another DaVinci Dustup: A prominent Catholic group portrayed in The DaVinci Code as a power-hungry collection of conspirators is urging that Sony Pictures remove passages of the book that are "insulting to Catholics" from its upcoming film version. Opus Dei, which is based in Rome, stopped short of calling for a boycott of the film, saying instead that "changes to the film would be appreciated by Catholics."
Link Who's Not Listening: The LA Times and the Failure of Political Imagination: The Los Angeles Times article “Masked Marxist, With Marimbas” (January 23, 2006) describes the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign like a bizarre provincial circus. By excluding information, using delegitimizing descriptive terms, and creating inaccurate and false characterizations, the Los Angeles Times reporters and editors strip the politics from the Other Campaign and convert it into a cartoonish spectacle.
Link 'Double Crystal Fusion' Could Pave The Way For Portable Device: Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design.
Link SVEN - Surveillance Video Entertainment Network (formerly AI to the People): "If computer vision technology can be used to detect when you look like a terrorist, criminal, or other 'undesirable' - why not when you look like a rock star?"
New species? You ain't seen nothing yet: The creatures found in New Guinea last week only reveal how little of nature we know, says Stuart Wavell.
Link Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group.
Link Placing Products Takes Off: The 30-second TV commercial is old news. Now product placement rules. Over "the last three years, the number of placements, including the new integration, jumped 30% to 108,261 last year. NBC ranked highest with 7,470 instances of a product being shown on its reality show The Contender alone and an additional 3,009 placement shots on The Apprentice."
Link monochrom info //
Georg Paul Thomann Or: A Short History Of A Collaborative Conspiracy  Johannes Grenzfurthner summarized our Thomann project in form of an article for AC:Collaborative (New York, NY). Thomann -- our fat, bloated context-canard -- is finally (con)textualized. Link // AC:Collaborative Link // ASCII version Valley of the wolves Iraq: In the most expensive Turkish movie ever made, American soldiers in Iraq crash a wedding and pump a little boy full of lead in front of his mother. A turkish Rambo takes revenge. The enemies: Billy Zane as insane soldier and Gary Busey as jewish-american doctor.
Link
The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
BLACK TO COMM - rückwärts backwards (Dekorder) CM VON HAUSSWOLFF - there are no birds ... (lampo) DEPTH AFFECT - arche-lymb (autres directions) LARYTTA - s/t (Creaked) MESCALINAEDEN / EVENTLESS PLOT - split (graceland)RAMSEY MIDWOOD - shootout at the ok chinese restaurant (Glitterhouse) Hypervirus: A Clinical Report: At the dawn of capitalism's fourth phase, the hypervirus awoke. Poisonous parasite, undead, ubiquitous and omnipotent.
Link Cultural shift: Inda and Sex: Some say India displays new openness about sex. Quote: "What is happening now, at least for India's moneyed younger class, is a cultural shift akin to what happened in the 1950s and the 1960s in the United States. The topic of sex is coming out from behind closed doors and drawn shades... The result is a growing gap between affluent, urban young people who embrace the idea of sexuality and a prevailing society that still idealizes virgins; between a country struggling with an AIDS epidemic and the refusal by many men to even contemplate the use of condoms."
Link Tyrannosaurs get a father figure: Fossil hunters find the first Jurassic specimen of this fearsome family.
Link PR Dei: When "The Da Vinci Code" became a publishing sensation, leaders of the Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei realized they had an image problem on their hands.
Link 'Parachuting' krill may provide bumper carbon sink: Antarctic krill appear to feed at the surface of the ocean and "parachute" down to deep waters more often than previously thought, a new study reveals, suggesting they take a bigger bite out of the carbon that contributes to global warming.
Link Alien Animal Planet: Flying whales, walking trees, three-eyed killer birds - NASA and SETI imagine life on other worlds. Quote: "On Aurelia, an Earth-sized planet half shrouded in perpetual darkness, vast floodplains give way to groves of treelike stinger fans that use ambulatory roots to creep across the muddy surface. On Blue Moon, a lunar orb in an adjacent solar system light-years from Aurelia, winged skywhales gulp aerial plankton suspended in the dense atmosphere, while balloon plants float beneath the canopies of massive pagoda tree forests, buoyed by hydrogen gas-filled membranes like miniature Hindenburgs."
Link Movie-Going - It's The Online Critics Who Count: Quote: "With the advent of the Internet, geography is history. Today, more than 90% of the target moviegoer demographic ages 13-34 go online to get their movie information."
Link Wearable Digital Video Camcorders: Quote: >>Wearable Digital Video Camcorders for all your huntcam, fishingcam, sportscam, actioncam, doctorcam, coachcam, helmetcam, bikecam & carcam needs! If having your eyes glued to your camcorder so you won't "miss" anything isn't your idea of fun, finally, there's a wearable, hands-free DVR that gives you the freedom to participate in the fun.<< (thanx, Carlos Katastrofsky)
Link Political videogame about McDonald's: Quote: "Making money in a corporation like McDonald's is not simple at all. Behind every sandwich there is a complex process you must learn to manage: from the creation of pastures to the slaught, from the restaurant management to the branding. You'll discover all the dirty secrets that made us one of the biggest company of the world."
 Link Le gUidE du RenarD des viLLeS: Very interesting video blogging/media art/resistance pieces in French language.
 Link monochrom content update // Gastro-Art: In gastronomical enterprises the management frequently elects to present art as a form of extraordinary room decoration. Some time ago we at monochrom have decided to dedicate a page to the breathtaking world of 'gastro-art'. And there are some excellent new gastro-art picture submissions.
 Link SuitSat: Listen To The Radio From A Space Station Spacesuit: If you were asked what station is currently orbiting 400 km above the Earth at 28 000 km/h you may be tempted to answer the International Space Station (ISS). This is of course correct but if you were to look with a good telescope behind the ISS (or tune in with the appropriate equipment) you may soon pick up a second station: a radio station.
 Link Mark Tilden - Robosapien's Inventor: Mark Tilden, started his robotics career at the University of Waterloo and went on to develop robots at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was then recruited by WowWee Toys, a Hong Kong based toy manufacturer, where he has produced some of the world’s most popular robot toys, like the Bio-Bug, Robosapien and Robosapien V2, Roboraptor and Robopet lines.
Link That song sounds familiar: An online service helps users find new music through a "genome project" that maps tunes' traits and spits out matches.
Link The Kingness of Mad George: The roots of the current debate over presidential power. Lincoln looked to "the people" or "the nation" as the inviolate source of his authority. Bush hearkens back to an older monarchical model.
Link Why America's top pundits are wrong: Anthropologists nail some of the pundits' more pernicous untruths.
Link Mystery Dada eBay Art: Check this out! Quote: "Surveying the dismal contemporary art offerings on ebay is depressing. They are all trite, kitch, office-art crap. Sure, it might be the sort of thing that people search for in order to fill that vacant wall space and impress chicks with their sophisticated cultural side, but it's really not cutting anyone's conceptual jugular. There are some good creatures being created out there, and I believe that a strong aspect of art is the risk - to your assumptions and your comfort zone. Essentially, I'm asking you to step out of your comfort zone, and risk a few dollars in a mysterious adventure of an ebay bid. THIS WILL BE THE MOST INTERESTING EBAY EXPERIENCE YOU HAVE."
Link monochrom interview // monochrom on VernissageTV / Part 3: Quote: >>Johannes Grenzfurthner talks about monochrom's first computer game "Soviet Unterzögersdorf". The game was featured in BoingBoing and Edge (games magazine) chose the game as their "internet game of the month" of November 2005. Monochrom has been invited to present the game at the festival for art and digital culture, Transmediale 2006, in Berlin. The fake history of the "last existing appanage republic of the USSR", Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. Created to discuss topics such as the theoretical problems of historiography, the concept of the "socialist utopia" and the political struggles of postwar Europe. Interview at the monochrom office located at Museumsquartier in Vienna, January 24, 2006, part 3.<<
 Link monochrom interview // monochrom on VernissageTV / Part 2: Quote: >>Johannes Grenzfurthner talks about the different backgrounds of the monochrom team and "Brandmarker", one of the projects monochrom got a lot of publicity for. The attempt to evaluate the actual power of brands by making Austrian people draw a total of twelve logos from memory led to some interesting conclusions, at the same time funny and disillusioning. Johannes Grenzfurthner: "They are like one way communication. Only designed to be recognized but not to be reproduced." Interview with Johannes Grenzfurthner at the monochrom office in Vienna, January 24, 2006, part 2.<<
Link R.I.P. - Western Union Has Delivered Its Last Telegram: After 145 years, Western Union has stopped delivering telegrams. "The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases. Faxes didn't help. Email could be counted as the final nail in the coffin."
Link Bush and the Dark Ages: Internationally acclaimed essayist, novelist and playwright Gore Vidal argues that America under Bush is evincing characteristics of the post-fall-of-Rome Dark Ages: the triumph of faith over reason, the atrophy of education and critical thinking, and integration of the state, torture and religion (Thnx, HC Voigt).
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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