The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism. The key to The Influencers is found in its guests and stories: impostors, pseudo-totalitarian musicians, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers, anarchitects and actors from invisible theatre. In these three days they are going to present their work, show known and less known material and speak with the public about challenges, goals and strategies. In the manipulation of everyday symbols, as well as within what is excessive and politically incorrect, we will possibly find inspiration for changing the present and imagining the future.

Sometimes a little stroll through history can have its uses. Take, as an example, the continuing debate over torture in post-9/11 America. Last week, Stephen Bradbury, the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, testified before the House Judiciary Committee about waterboarding. In defending its use, Bradbury took a deep dive into the past. He claimed that the CIA's waterboarding of at least three of its prisoners bore "no resemblance" to what torturers in the Spanish Inquisition had done when they used what was then called "the Water Torture."

As part of his defense of the techniques used by the Bush administration to gain information, Bradbury went out of his way to play the historian, claiming that the water torture of yore differed from today's American-style version in crucial ways. The waterboarding employed by interrogators during the infamous Spanish Inquisition, he insisted, "involved the forced consumption of a mass amount of water." This led, he claimed, to the "lungs filling with water" to the point of "agony and death." The CIA, on the other hand, employed "strict time limits," "safeguards," and "restrictions," making it a far more controlled technique. As he put it: "[S]omething can be quite distressing or uncomfortable, even frightening, [but] if it doesn't involve severe physical pain, and it doesn't last very long, it may not constitute severe physical suffering" -- and so would not qualify as torture. Bradbury summed up his historical case this way, "There's been a lot of discussion in the public about historical uses of waterboarding," but the "only thing in common is the use of water." [...]

Recall how World War I broke out after a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austro-Hungarian archduke in 1914 in Sarajevo, Bosnia. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia, Russia came to the defense of its ally. The alliance system kicked in; Germany and the Ottoman Empire joined the Austro-Hungarian, while France and Britain joined Russia. That system is long gone, but the relationship between Russia and Serbia, deeply rooted in ethnic and religious ties, should not be taken lightly.

Recall how Bill Clinton's big war was "Operation Allied Force," conducted by a somewhat reluctant NATO at U.S. insistence in 1999. Building upon NATO's "Operation Deliberate Force" targeting Serbian fighters in Bosnia four years earlier, it resulted in the aerial bombing of a European capital (Belgrade) for the first time since 1945. Human Rights Watch concluded in 2000 that between 488 and 527 Yugoslav civilians were killed as a result of the bombing, which forced Belgrade to obey Washington and withdraw its troops from the heart of the Serbian homeland.

That heart, of course, is Kosovo. Since the seventh century, when the Serbs pressing eastward from Dalmatia established themselves in the old Roman province of Upper Moesia, Kosovo has been the spiritual core of the Serbian nation. The Serbs have shared it with others, notably Albanians, and the Serbian gene-pool is itself complex and changing over time. But Serbian identity was shaped by the Battle of Kosovo Polje (The Field of Blackbirds) against the Ottoman Turks in 1389, in which both Serbian King Lazar and the Ottoman sultan Murad were killed. Modern historians differ about whether this was a draw or heroic defeat of the Serbs; nationalist mythology depicts it as the latter. [...]

The only thing that hasn't been engineered are the living things, ourselves. Again, what's the consequence of doing that at scale? Biotechnology is 30 years old; it's a young adult. Most of the work is still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let's not talk about it, let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with the consequences in terms of how this is going to change ourselves, how the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it's not going to be nation-state driven work necessarily, how an ownership sharing and innovation framework needs to be developed that moves beyond patent-based intellectual property and recognizes that the information defining the genetic material's going to be more important than the stuff itself and so you might transition away from patents to copyright and so on and so forth.

But back to "The Hospital Ship," a metaphor for the handful of independent enterprises (like Hypnodrome, RE/Search, SRL, The Crucible, monochrom) trying to create T.A.Z.'s (temporary autonomous zones) evocative of "real" lasting creative stimulating humor-filled relationships. Meanwhile, the world is becoming absolutely filled with "victims of mass psychosis" who THINK they’re "normal" but are incapable of a relationship longer than … well, they suffer from "total loss of both social and individual stability."

Syracuse University physicists hope that a new supercomputer will help them pick out the sound of a black hole from the cosmic symphony. The computer will process data gathered by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which is designed to listen for the ripples in space-time known as gravity waves.

Our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless--they are systematic. We all make the same types of mistakes over and over. So attached are we to certain kinds of errors, that we are incapable even of recognizing them as errors. Offered FREE shipping, we take it, even when it costs us.

NASA should focus its efforts on mounting a human mission to Mars, and downgrade its plans for a human presence on the Moon, says a distinguished group of space experts, including former NASA officials and ex-astronauts.

A group of about 45 people met at Stanford University in California, US, on 12 and 13 February for a meeting to reconsider NASA's human space exploration plans, including the possibility of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid, rather than to the Moon.

The timing of the conference during an election year highlights the possibility that the next US president could shift NASA's spaceflight priorities, which were authorised by Congress in 2005.

The European Union said Thursday that it would seek to extend copyright protection for singers and musicians to 95 years -- rather than the current 50 -- in a move intended to let performers receive royalty payments later in life.

The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism. The key to The Influencers is found in its guests and stories: impostors, pseudo-totalitarian musicians, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers, anarchitects and actors from invisible theatre. In these three days they are going to present their work, show known and less known material and speak with the public about challenges, goals and strategies. In the manipulation of everyday symbols, as well as within what is excessive and politically incorrect, we will possibly find inspiration for changing the present and imagining the future.

[...] there's no denying the lesson of today's media marketplace: give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria's Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it's the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile.

monochrom is an Austrian art-theory group with an international resume that makes me very jealous. I got the chance to sit down with Johannes Grenzfurthner and Evelyn Fürlinger over some Thai food and talk about some of his many achievements, as well as just talk with an intelligent and well-humored guy.

There are lots more show-notes necessary for this episode, but I don't have the time to sit and list all of the references we make. If someone is motivated and wants to help listing relevant websites, etc. I would appreciate it very much.

English graffiti artist Banksy's screen print of supermodel Kate Moss sold for $191,000 at a street-art auction in London. The work, inspired by Andy Warhol's iconic portrait of Marilyn Monroe, was one of 75 pieces of 'urban art' on sale.

The Innermost Unifier: Today it's the Corporate Anthem
A talk/audio performance by Johannes Grenzfurthner, monochrom (Vienna, Austria)

Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software-industry), Johannes Grenzfurthner gives a theoretical and applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate anthems.

Come and sing along. Powernapping is welcome, too.

Exercise may soon do more for you than tighten up your sagging muscles. Advances in biomechanical engineering could use energy generated while walking, hiking or running to power any device requiring portable power, including night-vision goggles and other battery-operated devices used by soldiers as well as robotic prosthetic limbs, cell phones and computers in remote locations where no other energy sources are available.

The movie theatre business isn't so much about movies any more. Sure, what's up on the screen is still key to getting your bum in the seat. But how much you spent on that snack in your hand is now crucially important, as are the advertisements you watch before the show, and the loyalty card that you used to pay for tickets. And it may not even be a movie you're watching.

The passion of young people for Obama's campaign is fueled by the Iraq war, an uncertain economy, major concerns about the environment and global warming, and the religious right's attacks on sexuality. But more than anything it's also fueled by Obama's eloquent insistence that change is possible and that ordinary citizens can play a key role. It's fueled by the sense that Obama's personal story anticipates the story of an America that moves beyond its divisions and tackles our fundamental problems. This group also seems to resist the idea that a presidency can simply be handed down like a dynastic succession.

Participating in numbers we haven't seen in decades, these new voters fervently want Obama to win. They're reaching out to enlist their peers and volunteering to help reach others. They can be a powerful force to help him prevail.

But if Hillary Clinton is nominated, this momentum will likely crumble. The young women and men who've been flooding the Democratic primaries and caucuses will feel betrayed by a candidate who's just finished doing her best to destroy the person they've invested their hopes in. And as a result, they may simply stay home. It's not just that Hillary is running against Obama. That would be fine. It's that she and Bill and their surrogates have relentlessly assaulted Obama's character, in a scorched-earth style worthy of Karl Rove.

Global confidence in the US economy has reached zero, as was proved by last month's stock market meltdown. But there is an enormous anomaly in the US economy above and beyond the subprime mortgage crisis, the housing bubble and the prospect of recession: 60 years of misallocation of resources, and borrowings, to the establishment and maintenance of a military-industrial complex as the basis of the nation's economic life.

It was recently reported that Craig Venter had achieved a monumental breakthrough in biology by creating a genetic sequence from lab chemicals alone. Although he claims to have created artificial life, he has not created life artificially; that is to say, he is not yet able to create life from scratch. But by implanting the artificial genetic code into a living bacteria, the artificial genes will take over and the creation of an altogether new kind of lifeform will have been achieved.

In some ways this is nothing new. Genetic modification of any kind – from breeding corgis to mutant corn – produces new varieties of life forms, each in a sense unique or distinct from their predecessors. Yet Venter's breakthrough is unlike previous genetic tinkering. It paves the way for achieving in a single bound what would otherwise take lifetimes to accomplish.

Venter describes his achievement as heralding "a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things we never contemplated before." This is not a case of one small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind. It calls for the replacement of our little steps with an altogether different stride.

"Iraq," swears Al Gore, "was the single worst strategic mistake in American history." Senate Majority leader Harry Reid agrees that the war he voted to authorize is "the worst foreign policy mistake in U.S. history," and indeed is already "lost." Many of our historically minded politicians and commanders have weighed in with similar superlatives. Retired General William Odom calls Iraq "the greatest strategic disaster in United States history." Senator Chuck Hagel (who voted for the war) is somewhat more cautious; he terms Iraq "the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." Jimmy Carter takes, as usual, the loftiest view: the Iraq War, and Great Britain's acquiescence in it, constitute "a major tragedy for the world," and prove that the Bush Administration "has been the worst in history."

Certainly there are legitimate questions about Iraq, as about all wars. Why, for example, did Tommy Franks, the Centcom commander who led American forces in a brilliant three-week victory over Saddam Hussein, abruptly announce his retirement in late May 2003—prompting a disruption in command just as the successful conventional war ended and an unexpected insurgency in Iraq gathered steam? Why were looters allowed to ransack much of Baghdad's infrastructure following the defeat of the Baathist army? Why "disband" the Iraqi military and purge its officer corps of Baathists at precisely the time law and order—not tens of thousands of unemployed youth—were needed? And weren't there too few occupying troops in the war's aftermath, along with too restrictive rules of engagement—but too prominent a profile for the American proconsuls busily dictating to the Iraqis?

100,000 performers standing in a 300x300 grid would act as the CPU. Similar grids would fulfill the function of RAM, motherboard ,and graphics card (each grid is dressed in a different colour for the visual effect). For the monitor you could simply utilise the usual brigade of 60,000 schoolchildren sitting on the spectator benches, each of whom can hold up a red, green or blue card (yielding a quite decent resolution of 200x300 pixels).

Ok, this computer won't be able to compete with the latest quad core machine. But it would probably allow Kim Jong-il to play Tetris or Pacman (at least the easy levels). Without having to worry about the all too common power outages that plague the country! Plus, he would be actually be interacting with his beloved people, rather than just passively watching. Think of the publicity.