The Good, The Bad, and The Awkward
Friday, April 30: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm in Room 26-100

With Mike Bender (Awkward Family Photos), Jonathan Standefer (Lamebook), Helen Killer (Regretsy), Douglas Chernack (Awkward Family Photos), Brad O'Farrell (Play 'em off Keyboard Cat).
Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom) [Moderator]

While we didn't bring Goatse (sorry/you're welcome about that), ROFLCon would be remiss to not spend a moment talking about the awkward on the web. Bringing together some of the folks that have done the most to commentate and celebrate that unique kind of fail on the web in the recent year, this panel examines the role that awkward things play on the web culture.

monochrom: let's network it out
Saturday, May 1: 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm in Room 56-180

monochrom is a worldwide operating collective dealing with technology, art, philosophy, and crap. Chances are high you've seen one of their projects on the net and didn't even know they created it. Among their projects, monochrom has released a leftist retro-gaming project, eaten sausages made from their own blood, invented Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling, buried people alive, and cracked the hierarchies of the art system with the Thomann Project. Johannes Grenzfurthner will give a brief introduction in the world of monochrom, context hacking and the powerless powers of guerrilla communication.

Information processing circuits in digital computers are static. In our brains, information processing circuits -- neurons -- evolve continuously to solve complex problems. Now, an international research team from Japan and Michigan Technological University has created a similar process of circuit evolution in an organic molecular layer that can solve complex problems. This is the first time a brain-like "evolutionary circuit" has been realized.

If you are the last of your kind like the Galapagos tortoise Lonesome George, then short of a virgin birth or cloning, your species is doomed. But it ain't all doom and gloom. Humans have stepped in to save species on the edge, sometimes dramatically and with some success.

Indeed, conservationists have suggested starting a "blue list" of species that have come back from the brink, mirroring the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of endangered species.

Bolivia—Here in this small Andean nation of 10 million people, the glaciers are melting, threatening the water supply of the largest urban area in the country, El Alto and La Paz, with 3.5 million people living at altitudes over 10,000 feet. I flew from El Alto International, the world’s highest commercial airport, to the city of Cochabamba.

Bolivian President Evo Morales calls Cochabamba the heart of Bolivia. It was here, 10 years ago this month, that, as one observer put it, "the first rebellion of the 21st century” took place. In what was dubbed the Water Wars, people from around Bolivia converged on Cochabamba to overturn the privatization of the public water system. As Jim Shultz, founder of the Cochabamba-based Democracy Center, told me, “People like a good David-and-Goliath story, and the water revolt is David not just beating one Goliath, but three. We call them the three Bs: Bechtel, Banzer and the Bank." The World Bank, Shultz explained, coerced the Bolivian government, under President Hugo Banzer, who had ruled as a dictator in the 1970s, to privatize Cochabamba's water system. The multinational corporation Bechtel, the sole bidder, took control of the public water system.

This collection of essays is in the nature of a running commentary on some of the main aspects of the turbulent course of capitalist development in the last years of the 1970s and the first of the 1980s. The focus is on the United States, still by a wide margin the biggest of the advanced capitalist countries, but the context is the global capitalist order, including its advanced, less-developed, and underdeveloped components. The first essay in the collection is dated November 1977, the last March 1981, and the summarizing "Introduction" was written in late summer 1981.

What has happened in the year that has passed since then? The answer, essentially, is more of the same.

Our favorite Austrians are back in the USSA to celebrate the release of their newest phonebook sized collection of random text. Johannes is here in LA and along with contributors such as Jason Brown, John Wilcock and me, will be doing readings from the book on Friday night at Machine Project.

There is sure to be talk of assorted deities and assorted diets, assorted sexual practices and assorted practical sexutices. Don't know what a sexutices is? You'll just have to come and find out. There will also be all sorts of riveting international politics and possibly something about rivets.

More info can be found here. Friday April 16, 2010, 8PM – 1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles

"A good way to describe John Wilcock is to say that he is a talented bohemian counter-culture journalist who once played a major role in the emergence of America's underground press. Born 1927 in Sheffield, England, he left school aged 16 to work on various newspapers in England, and on Toronto periodicals before moving to New York City. There in 1955 he became one of the five founders of the Village Voice in which he and co-founder Norman Mailer wrote weekly columns. Wilcock called his column "The Village Square", an intended pun. He and young Mailer were not quite friends, although Wilcock was at times annoyed, but always amused, by Mailer's monstrous ego." (From the preface of Manhattan Memories, by Martin Gardner)

The phatzine monochrom #26-34 (Goat of 1k Young) is an impossibility in an impossible universe -- an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. 500 pages (60 ounces) of outrageous printed bestiality.

I didn't permit myself to think about anything other than the task at hand. It was necessary to steel myself, steel myself firmly and grit my teeth. In the event that I lost consciousness, I'd given Sasha Artemev a syringe and shown him how to give me an injection. I chose a position half sitting. I explained to Zinovy Teplinsky how to hold the mirror. My poor assistants! At the last minute I looked over at them: they stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than white themselves. I was scared too. But when I picked up the needle with the novocaine and gave myself the first injection, somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn't notice anything else.

In March our prolific friends at monochrom released their latest book "monochrom #26-34, Ye Olde Self-Referentiality". They are currently doing a book release tour with upcoming stops in Los Angeles on April 16th at Machine Project, San Francisco on April 21st at Noisebridge, New York City on April 27th at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and in Munich on July 3rd at Department of Volxvergnuegen.

Bright lights, tunnels to the unknown and mysterious voices give near-death experiences an mystical air. The explanation may be something rather more mundane: plain old carbon dioxide. People who have near-death experiences during heart attacks tend to have higher levels of the molecule coursing through their veins.

Tens of thousands in Argentina recently marked the 34th anniversary of the nation's bloody military dictatorship, flooding into the historic Plaza de Mayo with cries of nunca más, or never again. On March 24, 1976 the military ceased (sic!) power and instituted one of Latin America's darkest chapters of terror. During the 1976-1983 junta, the military disappeared more than 30,000 people.

Since the 30th anniversary of the coup, in 2006, protests to repudiate the military coup have grown in size and political importance; at this year's protest more than 25,000 people overflowed the Plaza de Mayo while major human rights trials are underway. The Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo led the march carrying a banner with photos of the disappeared. The black and white portraits extended for blocks, with thousands of photos of unionists, students, artists, intellectuals, workers, lawyers, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and compañeros, many of whom were only in their 20s when commando groups kidnapped them to take them to clandestine detention centers, torture and later disappear this generation which dreamt of a better world. This generation was reflected in the outpouring on March 24, 2010, and in the collective screams of "30,000 disappeared—present! Now and Forever!"

Africa, the least urbanised continent, still has the highest urban growth rate, nearly 7% per year; 40% of Africans now live in towns, compared with 3% in 1900. By 2030 there will be 760 million Africans, and if current trends continue, more than 70% will live in slums or shanty housing on the outskirts of old colonial foundations (Kinshasa or Nairobi) or ancestral cities (Ibadan or Kano in Nigeria). Half of today's urban population – most of them under 25 – lives on less than $2 a day.

According to a 2008 UN Habitat report, this urban population has shown remarkable resilience despite living conditions that are frequently very difficult. The most dynamic proofs are the new music subcultures that have sprung up over the past 10 years, mostly in low-income communities in the main cities. Ivorian coupé-décalé, South African kwaito, Ghanaian hiplife and Angolan kuduro rework tradition using electronics and a 21st-century street attitude. But the hunger riots of the winter of 2008-9 were a reminder that this captive population, at the mercy of price rises in food and petrol, has felt neglected by central governments. Those governments have greatly contributed to the leap in property prices, helping to intensify urban gentrification.