[...]
1) Go to http://images.google.at
2) Let your goose (dog, cat, chicken or rabbit) speed over the keyboard.
3) You get a combination of characters (e.g. q´0 +34) ENTER.
[...]

/// V. VALE

In 1977, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti each gave V. Vale, a clerk at City Lights Bookstore, $100 to begin publishing "SEARCH & DESTROY," now called by Jello Biafra "the best punk magazine ever, combining in-depth interviews, lists and reference material with artist's photographs and layout." After eleven issues in a tabloid format, V. Vale launched Adolescent Records and then was the first American hired to start Rough Trade Records U.S.A. He subsequently convinced Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis to back the first issues of "RE/Search" (a pun on Search & Destroy). After three "RE/Search" tabloids, Vale's publishing took a turn towards a book format, beginning with a ground-breaking, still-classic issue featuring William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Throbbing Gristle. Other early books published by Vale include Mike Bloomfield's, "Me and Big Joe," Kathy Acker's "Great Expectations," and Terry Wilson & Brion Gysin's "Here To Go." At the same time, RE/Search began producing videos, music compilation CDs, and live events and concerts. The RE/Search series includes the "Industrial Culture Handbook" (just re-issued in a beautiful, limited edition hardback), four books involving J.G. Ballard (two recently: "J.G. Ballard Quotes," and "J.G. Ballard Conversations"), two books involving PRANKS, "Incredibly Strange Films" and "Incredibly Strange Music," the ground-breaking "Modern Primitives" (credited with "launching" the tattoo/body modification movement), and other volumes of noir historian author Daniel P. Mannix, noir writer Charles Willeford, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch of Graz, Austria, and others. RE/Search's latest book is "PRANKS 2."

/// VIOLET BLUE

Violet Blue is the best-selling, award-winning author and editor of over twenty books on sex and sexuality, two of which have been translated into French, Spanish, Russian and Turkish. Violet is a sex educator who lectures at UC's and community teaching institutions, and writes about erotica, pornography, sexual pleasure and health. She is a professional blogger and femmebot; a correspondent at Geek Entertainment TV; the sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and blogs for Gawker's Fleshbot.com and Metroblogging San Francisco. She was Wired's "sexy geek of 2005", she has survived being a Dorkbot SF presenter twice, and over ten years at Survival Research Laboratories -- where she does robotics, machine maintenance, industrial mechanical fabrication, welding, machine operation and robot performace production. Her podcast Open Source Sex has made iTunes cry for its mommy at least once. To visit her site, remove one item of clothing and click tinynibbles.com.

/// OLIVER HANGL

Oliver Hangl was born 1968 in Grieskirchen, Austria. Hangl, who originally startet his career as actor and stage designer in 1993, is just as active in performative disciplines and medial spaces as he is in classical fine arts exhibition sites. His current works, which are not tied to one medium, are marked by breaks in reality, doublings, and in between realms. Hangl is involved in a broad range of activites, in which he frequently switches between the positions of artist, actor, producer and/or director.

/// Visuals:

/// LA TRINCHERA

La Trinchera (the trench) is an Austrian-Mexican sound and projection collective based in Mexico City. La Trinchera found its beginnings in the First "Festival of Improvisation" staged in Mexico City, february 2004. Since then, La Trinchera has operated as generator of impulses, as a "free fire zone" and as a call to experimentation. Risking the clash of individual creative spirit in the immediacy of a visual situation, La Trinchera has successfully brought together more than 20 artists of many diverse world views. Four of them are guests at monochroms taugshow: Rafael Balboa (handmade 16mm film-loops), Manuel Trujillo (handmade 16mm film-loops), Aisel Wicab (handmade slides), Doris Steinbichler (overhead projector).

/// Regulars:

///Magistra Evelyn Fürlinger ("Wicked Wordz")

There seems to be something in the sensual waters of the current Viennese school that will not take the prevalent techno-fascisms lying down. There is heavy resistance full with humor and full-on attack, at least as far as museum sectors can allow for any serious public discourse and deconstructions. Exhibition and forums take place in Wien's institutional culture epicenter here in Wien known as the Museums Quartier. Roböxotica is the 8th gathering of techies, futurists and jammers putting the spin on the man-machine curve which might otherwise whisk humanity into the hyper-drive envelopes of business-as-usual and the discarnate dystopias with their irreversible price-tag infrastructures.

The dream of a universal or an interdisciplinary science is an old idea that is continually arising anew. Despite, or precisely because of, the increasing specialization of the sciences, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought forth numerous visions of a new interdisciplinary science transcending the limitations of traditional sciences mechanistic and analytic thinking. Cybernetics, the theory of dynamic systems, artificial life research and robotics are (or have been) among the hopeful candidates for such a new science. It has been repeatedly attested that these new disciplines could develop a (more) comprehensive language able to bridge the gap between the so-called "two cultures" of the natural and the human sciences. One might cite the example provided by the famous Macy Conferences, in which mathematicians, physicists, biologists and anthropologists cooperated.

Interestingly, the development of new techno sciences like cybernetics, AL research and robotics has had a wide-ranging influence on the most diverse fields of knowledge from natural and technological sciences to human, social and cultural sciences. They have either nested themselves under their own "label" in a great variety of disciplines, established themselves as new and independent interdisciplinary areas of research, or integrated themselves (or been integrated) into other fields. In the latter case, techno sciences like cybernetics, chaos theory and artificial life research gave up their individual "identity" as independent fields of knowledge. Cybernetics, for instance, was influential during the 1960s in a wide variety of areas from medicine, (molecular) biology, pedagogy, political science, sociology and philosophy to traffic planning and artificial intelligence. Today almost no one speaks of cybernetics, but its theorems and products remain present in many fields. In robotics, for example, cybernetic ideas like feedback, regulation and the black box model are booming.

Against this background, what are the perspectives of efforts toward establishing a new interdisciplinary approach and a different techno rationality in robotics, with its cybernetic heritage and its (biocybernetic) future? To what degree are new working approaches or even new forms of rationality to be found in robotics?

New forms of knowledge and knowledge production and new ways of creating artifacts are made possible by cybernetics and robotics. Today many robotics specialists fall back on cybernetics as a resource for ideas in realizing new technological developments. Our symposium will focus on epistemological and ontological affinities and differences as well as those found in the production of artifacts and will put special emphasis on interdisciplinarity and notions of a universal science.