Office art (especially office drawing) is a regular technique used by people in white-collar working situations. There may not necessarily be a creative impulse to create office work, but the impulse of overcoming general work boredom or the necessity to help office workers keeping focus during telephone conversations and/or office meetings. This page is dedicated to collecting office art.

monochrom will bring good old role-playing to the big stage.

Basic concept: The show will be a mixture of improvisational theatre, story telling and freeform role-playing, played with minimal rules and a greater focus on character or plot development, with the organizers as referees.

Gamemaster: Johannes Grenzfurthner (using very minimalistic GURPS rule set)

Players: Some of the prominent guests of SIGINT. But still a secret.

Storyline: Will not be discussed yet.

Live Music: Jonathan Mann

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.

11-year old Emmanuel Osei works as a scrap collector in Ghana, scavenging metal from the corpses of Western computers, televisions and other end-of-life electronic products that have been dumped in West Africa. His goal is to salvage the odd gram of useful metals such as copper, which he can resell for a few cents. To isolate those metals he and his fellow rubbish-pickers have to burn away the useless plastics in the insulation tubes and circuit boards. Black clouds rise above the scrap heaps from the fires – a toxic mist that boys like Emmanuel constantly breathe in. Sometimes, to make the fires more effective, rubber car tyres are thrown on to the flames - adding some new ingredients to the toxic cocktail.

The work on the dumps is hard and unsophisticated. At Agbobloshie in Ghana's capital, Accra, for example, old computer screens are smashed to pieces up by boys using rocks. The ground was a carpet of broken glass. The air stuck in your throat.

Campaigners warn that this is where your computer could end up if you don’t dispose of it properly. The trade is speeding up as we in the West continually upgrade our hardware. Hundreds of tons of E-waste is now said to be arriving in West Africa every month. A group from the Austrian NGO Südwind has been in West Africa to investigate the trade.

Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

Bio-synergy Skinny Water, is the first in the world to be fortified with l-carnitine and chromium. A low-calorie water, enhanced with a unique combination of ingredients to help support healthy weight loss.

This is just the start, of course. I'd also suggest that efforts be made to develop more radical hacktivist projects, particularly aligned towards ongoing social struggles. What if an Anonymous-style movement went after the Minutemen and nativist anti-immigration groups rather than the Church of Scientology? Hacklabs should also be connecting to these ongoing social movements and offering their technical expertise and support. Imagine if a worker-occupied factory was able to continue production under worker control thanks to the adoption of reprap machines or other open source 3D printers, facilitaed by hacktivists? What if DIY robot hackers assembled fleets of drones to aid in Copwatch programs, using sousveillance to keep abuses of authority in line? Even better, what if these hackerspace users took their politics back to the labs, factories, and offices in which they work, enabling a new movement of radicalized scientists and techies to counter the corporate uses and abuses of their research and intellectual labor? What are we waiting for?

Much has been written about the Insight, Honda's new low-priced hybrid. We've been told how much carbon dioxide it produces, how its dashboard encourages frugal driving by glowing green when you're easy on the throttle and how it is the dawn of all things. The beginning of days.

So far, though, you have not been told what it's like as a car; as a tool for moving you, your friends and your things from place to place.

So here goes. It's terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It's the first car I've ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.

Altering fans, televisions, and other everyday appliances, converting their functions into something utterly different, UMEDA creates objets freed from their original meanings. His works, created to suit the spaces in which they will be installed, use utterly familiar, commonplace phenomena, channeled through his clever handiness and unique spatial sensibility, to create mysterious, seemingly impossible sensations. They thereby free one from rigid perceptions constrained by preconceived ideas.

Tetsuya Umeda is an artist currently working in Osaka, Japan. He has done several sound installation projects and performance that generates site-specific soundscape using minimal function of electric circuit/system and simple physical phenomena. Umeda has been performed in Festival Beyond Innocence, an experimental music festival in Japan, since 2002. In 2006, he performed in internationally acclaimed underground music event, INSTAL, in Scotland, UK. He also has been participated installation/exhibition project; in 2006, he participated the London-based residency program, The Listening Project. in 2007, participated the exhibition program, Sound Effect Seoul, and stayed in San Francisco for one month for his Waitool Sounds project.

Web: siranami.com

The Reverend Ksawery Knotz has a message for all married Catholic couples out there: there's nothing wrong with a steamy sex life.

In fact, it's a good thing.

In his new book Sex As You Don't Know It: For Married Couples Who Love God, the Polish friar provides a theological and practical guide for Catholics that has little in common with the strait-laced attitudes often associated with the Roman Catholic Church.

'Some people, when they hear about the holiness of married sex, immediately imagine that such sex has to be deprived of joy, frivolous play, fantasy and attractive positions,' Knotz writes.

'(They think) it has to be sad like a traditional church hymn.'

The current economic crisis has reignited a debate about Keynesianism that many had thought only of historical interest. This commentary suggests that the revival of Keynesianism undermines a key assumption of almost all accounts of postwar capitalism, namely that it can be fundamentally divided into a "Keynesian" and a "post-Keynesian" period.

Keynesianism is taken here to mean the use by national governments of their taxing and spending power to alter the overall level of economic activity. Across the developed world national governments are pursuing expansionary fiscal policies, and accumulating public deficits, as part of their attempts to limit the recessionary impact of the banking crisis. While there is much debate about the precise shape of such packages, almost all countries have some measures of this character planned or enacted. A few voices have raised concerns about the long-term impact of such packages, but they have been ineffective against the compelling need felt by most governments to be seen to be using all possible instruments to stave off economic collapse.

These events clearly contradict the narrative of economic policy developments which sees Keynesian policies as a product of the middle years of the twentieth century, ideologically challenged and then comprehensively defeated by monetarism and neoliberal economics from the 1970s onwards. For many commentators this ideological shift was in turn rooted in a transformation of the productive character of capitalist economies, so the "end of Keynesianism" reflected not just ideological defeat for the centre-Left, but a profound transformation in the nature of capitalist economies. For this narrative, the revival of Keynesian policies in the early twenty-first century appears incomprehensible. There has been no sustained ideological challenge to the predominance of neoliberalism, nor an identified shift back to the economic structure that is purported to have been the material base for the earlier phase of Keynesianism. Clearly that narrative needs to be revised.

Perhaps the best place to start that revision is to ask the simple question, what are the conditions of existence of Keynesian policies?

Thanks to the one-size-fits-all anti-terrorism laws, artists from outside the EU now need to go through a complex process of finding a sponsor and getting all manner of fingerprints and face-scans prior to travelling to the UK. ... [D]o we really need a scan of Robert LePage's face to know that he's not coming here to bomb Canary Wharf?

In December, the New York Times published a 5,100-word article charging that the Bush administration's housing policies had "stoked" the foreclosure crisis--and thus the financial meltdown. By pushing for lax lending standards, encouraging government enterprises to make mortgages more available, and leaning on private lenders to come up with innovative ways to lend to ever more Americans—using "the mighty muscle of the federal government," as the president himself put it—Bush had lured millions of people into bad mortgages that they ultimately couldn't afford, the Times said.

Yet almost everything that the Times accused the Bush administration of doing has been pursued many times by earlier administrations, both Democratic and Republican—and often with calamitous results. The Times's analysis exemplified our collective amnesia about Washington's repeated attempts to expand homeownership and the disasters they've caused. The ideal of homeownership has become so sacrosanct, it seems, that we never learn from these disasters. Instead, we clean them up and then—as if under some strange compulsion—set in motion the mechanisms of the next housing catastrophe.

Our brains don't see everything - the world is too big, too full of stimuli. So the brain takes shortcuts, constructing a picture of reality with relatively simple algorithms for what things are supposed to look like. Magicians capitalize on those rules." Says Teller (of Penn and), "If the audience asks, 'How the hell did he do that?' then the experiment was successful. I've exploited the efficiencies of your mind.

I have my very own Israel problem and it is this: the Israel I know, which I have visited for weeks at a time, which I experience through its literature and media and the Israeli citizens I have met, bears no relation to the Israel I see in most of the Western media. That Israel seems almost to dominate Western intellectual life. It is commonly held that Israel lies at the heart of the widespread Muslim hostility to the West and much of the ideological conflict in the Middle East. But Israel must surely also lie at the heart of the West itself; it is so often the centrepoint of raging ideological debate, shrill mutual denunciation, ferocious polemic, emotional demonstrations, university activism and academic boycotts.

That Israel of the Western mind (and indeed of the Arab mind) is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion, indifferent especially to Palestinian suffering.

Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left wing, having founded in the kibbutz movement one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history. It is intellectually disputatious; any two Israelis will have three opinions and be happy to argue them to a lamp post. It is multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life. I've heard Israelis voice a desire to neutralise Hezbollah or remove Hamas from leadership in Gaza, but I've never in any context heard an Israeli express the view that the value of a human life is determined by race.

The broad thrust of this impressive overview of 200 years of British labour history concerns the dichotomy between a rich radical socialist tradition and an equally influential reformist current. The latter tendency was perhaps best exemplified by the Labour leader Keir Hardie, who at the beginning of the 20th century identified his and the Labour Party's politics as 'labourism': a 'theory and practice which accepted the possibility of social change within the existing framework of society'.

A syndicalist pamphlet of 1912, The Miners' Next Step, presents an entirely different conception of working-class politics: 'an industrial vote will affect the lives and happiness of workmen far more than a political vote ... hence it should be more sought after and its privileges more jealously guarded.' In view of the 25th anniversary of the era-defining miners' strike of 1984-85, this revised edition is a timely release.

Davis's survey begins in the early part of the 19th century, when early union leaders realised, well before Marx, that 'political power, being based on economic wealth, could only be dislodged by workers at the point of production'. The scope for an effective mass movement was limited by divisions of skill and organisational capability, as the organised, skilled sectors pulled away from the unskilled masses, first undercutting support for Chartism and, as the years went by, forming a seemingly exclusive class of their own.

It was October 25, and I suppose it was the middle of the night, given the time difference between the Netherlands and Virginia, when a Dutch newspaper nabbed my grandmother.