The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
 (etre) - a post fordist parade in the strike of events (baskaru) BARDO POND - ticket crystals (all tomorrow's parties) GINTAS K - lendvai / 60x one minute audio colours of 2kHz sound (Cronica) ROEL MEELKOP - 5 ambiences (intransitive) URKUMA - rebuilding pantaleone's tree (baskaru) monochrom call // Arse Electronica: Pornography And Technological Innovation: Call For Everything
From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. No one can predict what the future will bring, but history indicates that sex will continue to play an essential role in technological development. monochrom wants to organize an international conference with experts from the fields of science, economics, art and technology and an exhibition featuring international artists and designers. We are looking for: speakers, designers, artists, funding, location (probably on the West Coast of the US?).  Link Planet-Forming Disks Might Put The Brakes On Stars: Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have found evidence that dusty disks of planet-forming material tug on and slow down the young, whirling stars they surround.
Link monochrom in Montreal // monochrom @ Zeke's Galley, Montreal:
"We're great together, the liberal society and its enemies!"  A gala talk performance. Saturday July 29, 2006; 7:30pm. Link What is red mercury? Three men have been cleared of trying to procure the raw ingredients for a "dirty bomb" which the prosecution claimed could have devastated a British city if it fell into the hands of terrorists. But mystery surrounds the material at the centre of the plot. So what exactly is red mercury?
Link Intergalactic Service with a Smile: Until her death in 1994, Klarer insisted that after much telepathic chatting up, she had been visited and seduced by Akon, a tall Aryan type. In 1956, she says, she spent four months with him on Meton, a planet circling the nearest star to Earth, Alpha Centauri, where she gave birth to a galactic cross-breed.
Link Nicotine 'sobers up' drunk rats: Cigarettes could slash blood-alcohol levels, making smokers drink more.
Link How Do You Tell A Real Pollock? Quote: "Pollock at his peak burned his past conditioning and present turmoil, his very identity and character as a man, and he burned them clean. There's nobody to recognize. That's why it can be hard at first sight to tell a true Pollock from a fake. He prepared us to believe that absolutely anything was possible for him. What determines authenticity for me is a hardly scientific, no doubt fallible intuition of a raging need that found respite only in art."
Link monochrom in NYC // monochrom @ HOPE 6, NYC:
"We're great together, the liberal society and its enemies!"  A gala talk performance. Friday July 21st, 2006; 3pm. Hotel Pennsylvania, HOPE 6 Con, Area B. Link The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
JOHNNY CASH - a hundred highways (American) CHANG FFOS - trust this arcane device (Interstellar) HINTERLANDT - Automatic teller machine (sopot) PETER HOLY - jänner (nightpass handmade) LUKAS SCHOLLER - at hand (Mahorka) Map of Mozart: Vienna University of Technology created a automatically generated music landscape of all the music written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
They used a self-organizing mapping tool, that extracts "rythm-patterns" to arrange the music in a two-dimensional map in shape of Mozarts portrait. online demo version New monochrom contagion // Nation of Zombia spreads: More and more citizens registered.
Blogging LA reports. Link MIT Creates Fiber Webs That See: In a radical departure from conventional lens-based optics, MIT scientists have developed a sophisticated optical system made of mesh-like webs of light-detecting fibers. The fiber constructs, which have a number of advantages over their lens-based predecessors, are currently capable of measuring the direction, intensity and phase of light (a property used to describe a light wave) without the lenses, filters or detector arrays that are the classic elements of optical systems such as eyes or cameras.
Link The Oz Witch Project: Quote: "In October of 1994, four friends disappeared in the woods near Emerald City while shooting a documentary called 'The Oz Witch Project'. A year later their footage was found."
Link Radio tags can expose surgical mistakes: Automatic detection could reveal equipment left in the body.
Link Where Is A Map Of The Academic World? Quote: "It is now relatively easy to produce and distribute content. But it also proves a challenge to find one’s way around in a zone that is somehow expanding, crowded, and borderless, all at once. With such difficulties in mind, then, I want to propose a kind of public-works project. The time has come to create a map. In fact, it is hard to imagine things can continue much longer without one. At very least, we need a Web site giving users some idea what landmarks already exist in the digital space of academe."
Link New monochrom contagion // Nation of Zombia:
July 14th is the offical founding day of the Nation of Zombia. A zombie is a member of the Zombie Nation -- which wants to turn the United States of America and the Federal Constitutional Monarchy and Parliamentary Democracy of Canada into Zombia, the home of the Zombies. A zombie has to hold a xeroxed certification. A zombie looks like and acts like every average North American because he or she is an average North American apart from the fact that he or she is a zombie -- which means an ex-human. Each zombie can infect any other US and Canadian citizens.  You want to be turned into a zombie? Sometime in the future a zombie with legal zombie nation documents might address you. Think of it as a chance. But please be aware: Being turned into a zombie is a legal act of naturalization. Link und epidemic map The Ghosts of Alfred Dreyfus: Intro: "On July 12, France will celebrate the centennial of the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer whose false indictment on a charge of treason set off a political scandal in the country. In a certain light, it would seem that the Dreyfus Affair -- and the environment in which it emerged -- has long since been buried. Yet Dreyfus has remained an iconic part of the political landscape in France."
Link The Rise of the Aerotropolis: Quote: "Major airports are beginning to drive business siting and urban development in the 21st century, much as highways did in the 20th, railroads in the 19th, and seaports in the 18th. As aviation-oriented businesses cluster at and near major airports, a new urban entity is emerging: the Aerotropolis."
Link Why Today I Wear My Zidane Jersey: Intro: >>Imagine Michael Jordan in his last game, with the score tied in overtime, knocking out his defender with a punch to the throat. Imagine Derek Jeter in game seven of the World Series, at bat with the bases loaded, thrashing the opposing team's catcher over the head with his bat. Our collective shock would only be exceeded by disappointment. No one, fan or foe, would want to a see a great player end their career in an act that speaks to the worst impulses of sports: when hard competition spills over into violence. Now imagine if Jordan and Jeter claimed they were provoked with a racial slur. Does their violence become understandable? Even excusable? Herein lies the case of French National team captain, the great Zinedine Zidane.<<
Link Why Is Art Supposed To Be Easy? Quote: "According to current wisdom, listening to music, reading poetry or contemplating a painting should not be thought of as work, least of all as hard work. Works of art that demand serious attention, time and effort are treated with suspicion because they might not appeal to a significant section of the population.The official politics of culture of our time stigmatises such art for not being inclusive. Inclusive art is that which is readily accessible since it does not require much effort or understanding on the part of the public. From this standpoint, the engagement with art is not seen as a challenge but as an easily digestible act of consumption."
Link monochrom in Toronto // monochrom @ Mercer Union, Toronto:
"We're great together, the liberal society and its enemies!"  A gala performance. Thursday July 13th, 2006; 8pm. Link Author's unfortunate life sentence: Poor Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The 19th century author coined such enduring gems of wisdom as "The pen is mighter than the sword," but just let him write the worst opening sentence in English literature, and they never let him forget it. This year's Bulwer-Lytton competition, in which contestants write the very best worst sentence possible using his style, has a winner:
"Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean."Link Controlling Robots That Search For Mars Life: As part of ESA's ambitious, long-term Aurora exploration programme, ExoMars will search for traces of life on Mars. The mission requires entirely new technologies for self-controlled robots, built-in autonomy and cutting-edge visual terrain sensors.
 Link U.S. Will Give Detainees Geneva Rights: The Bush administration now says that all detainees at Guantanamo and in U.S. military custody everywhere are entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions, with spokesman Tony Snow insisting that "It's not really a reversal of policy."
Link The bigger the dinosaur, the hotter its blood: It's a classic debate: Were dinosaurs cold-blooded, sun-worshipping reptiles or a warm-blooded bunch? It turns out they were both, depending on their size.
Link Between Electoral Theater and Revolution: Bolivia Looks Toward Rewriting its Constitution: Intro: "Before Evo Morales won a landslide victory in the Bolivian presidential election on December 18, 2005, one of his key campaign promises was to organize a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution. The election for representatives to that assembly took place on Sunday, July 2nd in tandem with a referendum on autonomy for all provinces. The election, and its results, revealed significant aspects of the relationship between the Morales administration and the social movements that helped put him in power."
Link Engineers Make Like a Tree: Scientists looking for new engineering breakthroughs are "studying plant bionics, which involves cherry-picking evolution's best biological solutions and applying them to engineering problems. The advantage is that you have these hundreds of thousands of (biological) systems and you know they work because of evolution."
Link monochrom Canada/USA tour // monochrom on tour: "We're great together, the liberal society and its enemies!"
Performances at --- Mercer Union, Toronto/ON; Thursday July 13th, 2006; 8pm. --- HOPE 6, Hotel Pennsylvania, Area B; NY/NY; Friday July 21, 2006; 3pm. --- Zeke's Gallery, Montreal/QB; Saturday July 29, 2006; 7:30pm.  monochrom from Vienna is a collective, operating worldwide, that deals with technology, art, context hacking and philosophy and was founded in 1993. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. Their mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has released a leftist retro-gaming project, established a 1 baud semaphore line through the streets of San Francisco, started an illegal space race through Los Angeles, buried people alive in Vancouver, and cracked the hierarchies of the art system with The Thomann Project. In Austria they ate blood sausages made from their own blood in order to criticize the grotesque neoliberal formation of the world economy. Sometimes they compose melancholic pop songs about dying media and hosted the first annual and inevitably leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics. At the moment they're planning a conference about pornography as one of the driving forces of technological innovation. Also they do international soul trade, propaganda camps, epic puppet theatre, aesthetic pregnancy counseling, food catering and -- sorry to mention -- modern dance. monochrom's medley is a little tour-de-farce about their projects and political motivation. Altogether, this evening will be a joyful bucket full of good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair, condensed into the well known cultural technique of a gala show. Powernapping highly welcome. Something is missing in Russia: Russia's political landscape is now having a blind-spot. Social Democracy is missing. That's at least what Russian journalists and political analysts are thinking, as it's been a decade and a half so far of them, waiting for someone to fill this blind-spot. In the run-up to the 2007 elections the issue of the Russian social democratic force is once again being tossed about by experts and spin doctors. At this point finding a generous investor seems to be enough to handle this issue. Ukraine, for instance, has got something that may seem to be a kind of a social democracy. To be more precise, even two of them - the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine of Victor Medvedchuk and the Socialist Party of Ukraine of Aleksandr Moroz. Neither of them, however, are officially accepted members of the Socialist International. In other words, they don't posses a "quality certificate", issued by Western Europe. But does that matter?
Link Exploring artists' image as loners and bohemians: It's a phenomenon that seems to cross all artistic genres and mediums: the live-fast, die-hard lifestyle of artists from James Dean to Lord Byron. But why is it that artists capable of communicating such profundity through their work are so frequently incapable of normal social interaction? "A new exhibition at Britain's National Gallery traces the image of the artist as rebellious loner from its Romantic roots through works by Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Edgar Degas and others."
Link monochrom live appearence // "Lord Jim Lodge powered by monochrom": As announced at a press conference in Berlin's Cafe Einstein in March 2006, monochrom has assumed ownership of all trademark and usage rights of the artist Joerg Schlick's "Lord Jim Lodge". Schlick, who died in December 2005, developed the brand name together with Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen and Wolfgang Bauer during the 1980s. This takeover has far-reaching consequences for numerous artistic endeavors. In cooperation with the Berlin art consulting agency Teyssandier-Springer, monochrom has lodged claims asserting its rights in the affair while simultaneously inviting the owners of the works in question to negotiate a satisfactory out-of-court settlement.
 We have been invited to talk about the future of monochrom and the "Lord Jim Lodge". Location of the presentation: Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria. July 28, 2006; 7 PM. Link The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
THE PAPER CHASE - now you are one of us (trost/killrockstars) MY WAY MY LOVE - it is but one of billions of galaxies in your universe ATONE - un an (autres directions) THE GOURDS - heavy ornamentals (eleven thirty) DANIEL MAZE - treehugger EP (12rec) Pressure Mounts On Iran To Release Philosopher: International pressure is growing on Iran to release a prominent philosopher and writer, Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was arrested two months ago on unspecified charges. is incarceration in the notorious Evin prison has left Tehran's intellectual circles concerned about his fate and their own.
Link Australia in the Region: Intro: "When Australia’s ally, the United States made the Asia Pacific its top strategic priority in the 2001 Quadrennial Defence Review, it was clear to all defence analysts that the 'peer competitor' was China. Indeed, in the last year America has not been shy about revealing the Pentagon's direction – it was Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice’s remarks on her way to Australia this year that finally signaled a long held view from the hill."
Link Bianca! DaddyD writes: "Those Talentshow thingies are scary. Usually. But sometimes they can serve up that little something that makes you go ooh. Like an 11 year old girl who sings with the voice of an experienced soul singer. Bianca Ryan is a contestant on Americas Got Talent, and in her case, it's true. It's spooky to watch the 11 year old release a voiced on the audience that just seems way to big to have come from that little girl. It's awe inspiring. It's scary. It's Mr Hasselhoff's new job."
Link Broken Genius: the rise and fall of William Shockley, creator of the electronic age: By Joel N Shurkin; Palgrave Macmillan, 298pp.
 William Shockley left two extraordinary legacies to posterity. One is the transistor, which is to the electronic world what cells are to the living one. The other is an archive based on the principle that nothing may be thrown away and everything must be filed. In the course of his investigations - which involved the cracking of two safes - Joel Shurkin found a note to General Foods about a Jello recipe, a wooden splinter that had destroyed one of the boy Shockley's dimples, and a suicide note. He did not, however, find any redeeming features. We can now be confident that William Shockley really was as detestable as he always appeared. Link Odor recorder: Scientists in Japan are building an odor recorder. Quote: "Simply point the gadget at a freshly baked cookie, for example, and it will analyse its odour and reproduce it for you using a host of non-toxic chemicals. The device could be used to improve online shopping by allowing you to sniff foods or fragrances before you buy, to add an extra dimension to virtual reality environments and even to assist military doctors treating soldiers remotely by recreating bile, blood or urine odours that might help a diagnosis."
Link Jellyfish-like Creatures May Play Major Role In Fate Of Carbon Dioxide In The Ocean: Transparent jellyfish-like creatures known as salps, considered by many a low member in the ocean food web, may be more important to the fate of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the ocean than previously thought.
Link Woman Wakes After Stroke With New Accent: A woman emerged from a stroke to find that her Geordie accent had been transformed into a Jamaican one. She is one of only 50 people to have been recorded as suffering from foreign accent syndrome.
Link U.S. residents are less healthy, less able to access health care than Canadians: Universal coverage appears to reduce healthcare inequalities.
Link Satan is Real: The Louvin Brothers' High Lonesome Theology, walking the line between the devil and camp. Quote: >>Ira Louvin, a drunkard, a brute, and one half of Elvis’ favorite gospel duo, sang in a tenor that pioneered the place of sin close to the heart of country music. [...] It was Ira Louvin—the older brother, the songwriter, the genius—who in 1958 designed the cover of the Louvin Brothers’ most famous album, Satan Is Real: a photograph of him and his brother, Charlie (in matching white linen suits, pink shirts, and squared-off blue ties), singing, arms outstretched, before what look to be the pits of Hell. Looming behind their backs, amid the flames: a big red devil, complete with fangs, horns, and a bloody pitchfork. [...] Is that Satan a joke? And if so, what is he doing there? These questions (and what are, I think, the answers: "Of course… but kind of scary too"; and "Unclear") point to a vein of self-conscious humor in the Louvin Brothers’ gospel that’s easy to mistake for kitsch. Many—most—truths in country music are spoken half in jest. No music is more embarrassed about its own theatricality.<<
 Link Torture Care: The Medical Foundation is a human rights organisation that exists to enable survivors of torture and organised violence to engage in a healing process to assert their own human dignity and worth.
Link Top computer hangs on to its title: IBM's BlueGene/L computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, has once again been crowned world champion by the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers used for scientific applications. Ned Stafford digs into the story behind the fastest computers on the planet.
 Link Darwinism Invades the Social Sciences: 3quarksdaily writes: >>In the 1970's, 80s and 90's, "economic imperialism"--a term that refers to the invasion by the methods of neoclassical economics and game theory of the other social sciences--was the rage. Now evopscyh begins its tear across the social sciences and the "standard social scientific model". A review of Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (edited by Jerome H. Barkow), in Evolutionary Psychology.
I began my graduate career in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, where the great sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe taught all his career. I was a stupid SSSM ("Standard Social Science Model") sociology graduate student then, and I joined the chorus of the confederacy of dunces to ridicule Pierre's sociobiological work. More than a decade later, I discovered evolutionary psychology on my own by reading Wright's The Moral Animal, and converted to it overnight. When I began working in EP, I apologized to Pierre for having been too dense to see the light a decade earlier, and told him my grand plan to introduce EP into sociology and revolutionize social sciences. Pierre was encouraging but cautious. He told me that he had tried to do that himself a quarter of a century earlier but to no avail. Sociologists were just too stupid to understand the importance of biology in human behavior, a view that he has expressed in print (van den Berghe, 1990), and he eventually left the field in disgust. Blinded by youthful optimism and ambition, I did not heed Pierre's cautionary words and tried very hard to introduce EP into sociology. Nearly ten years later, I too have now come to his conclusion, and have left sociology in disgust. I have given up on the social sciences.Link Dracula: Foul fiend? Or enlightened thinker? Steff Haha emailed us: "There's a neat interpretation of Dracula in The Imperial Archive (th. richards) which argues (simplified) that Dracula is a creature that stands outside of the then current theory of evolution, can't be classified, AND that this creature reverses the direction of colonization, invading Britain, etc., well worth a read."
Link "Choosing Children" by Jonathan Glover: John Lanigan considers problems Jonathan Glover has with Choosing Children. Intro: >>This book is a lucid account of many of the issues surrounding genetic intervention and the possibilities it has opened up for the future of humankind. To what extent should we use genetic engineering and genetic selection to fix the characteristics of our children before they are born? In his first chapter, Jonathan Glover, Professor of Medical Ethics at King's College, London, discusses the ways in which 'disability', which genetic intervention (GI) may aim to overcome, could be defined. Glover has no prejudice concerning what is termed the 'expressivist' view, ie the idea that 'normal' people neither know nor have any right to judge that what seems to them a disadvantaged life is somehow less rich than their own. Nevertheless, Glover concludes that on balance there are no a priori reasons to reject the use of GI either to overcome disability or to promote enhanced human flourishing for a 'normal' foetus or implanted embryo. Furthermore, this promotion of human flourishing needn't necessarily exclude 'non-medical' interventions to produce 'designer babies'.<<
Link Fighting For Women Artists - Have The Guerrilla Girls Helped? Since the 80s, the Guerrilla Girls have been protesting the lack of representation of women artists. "They say it's amazing how little has changed: in 2005, they conducted some fresh research into European collections, and found that, even where museums owned significant amounts of work by female artists, it was all in the basement. To coincide with last September's Venice Biennale, they released the following statistics: of 1,238 artworks exhibited by the major Venice spaces, fewer than 40 are by women."
Link monochrom server report // Server: We are currently moving our server to the Funkfeuer / ViVi II space in Vienna. Problems with our pages can occur. Sorry!
[The Archives] 
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. . 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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