Forget wondering whether androids dream of electric sheep. The real question is: Do they have erotic visions and robot orgies?

From movies and television to comic books and the internet, science fiction not only creates fantastical visions of the future, but provides a template for the continuing evolution of sex, according to Johannes Grenzfurthner, founder of Austrian art collective monochrom.

[...]

Wed, Sep 24, 730PM: Meet RE/SEARCH at Million Fishes, 2501 Bryant/23rd St. FREE! A party featuring a Counter Culture Hour episode of Roboexotica (monochrom members will be present!). Guaranteed fun!

++TAUGSHOW #16++

Divine Special (Paraflows 08 festival special)

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 / 8:00 PM @ Metalab, Vienna

We are not allowed to talk about the special guest hosts... yet!

But who are our guests?

/// TREVOR PAGLEN
Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us.

/// JASON SCOTT
Jason Scott is a digital historian and documentary filmmaker based out of the Northeastern US, focusing on bulletin board system culture of the 1970s and 1980s. He often finds himself well outside of that realm and has collected many archives of general computer and software history, which he makes available on various parts of his online archive, TEXTFILES.COM.

/// RACHEL LOVINGER
Rachel Lovinger works at Avenue A | Razorfish as a Senior Content Strategist, developing ways for global clients to help connect users to the quality content they want and need. She's particularly interested in relevance, findability, signification, and inherently funny words.

/// Regulars:
EVELYN FÜRLINGER, MA.
Evelyn presents "Wicked Wordz", our regular column about lingustics.

/// Showband
THE INCOHERENT DEITIES
Oh yes.

Trevor Paglen is geographer and artist and he takes us on a road trip through the world of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people: through a landscape that military and intelligence insiders call the "black world." Over the course of his talk, Paglen leads us from "non-existent" Air Force and CIA installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure "black sites" startlingly close to home. Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world’s internal contradictions give rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.

[...] a chat with Johannes of Monochrom, sponsors of the Arse Electronika art/sex/culture conference coming up in San Francisco... the only art/sex/culture conference with its own theme song!

Es war 1998. Zum ersten Mal wurde das Künstler-Medien-Kollektiv "monochrom" von einer etablierten Institution eingeladen, ein Online-Projekt zu zeigen – einen Roboter, der via Chat fernzusteuern war. Bloß: "Als wir ankamen", sagt Johannes Grenzfurthner, merkten wir, dass es keinen Internet-Anschluss gab."

Statt an meinen Vortrag zu arbeiten habe ich jetzt die ersten vier Folgen 'Geister' gesehen. Mir gefiel vor allem die 'Loge'. Genauso stelle ich mir die KünstlerInnengruppe monochrom vor...

Boing Boing tv's "best of" retrospective continues, with a look back at some of the episodes we dig most. One of the things that makes me (and the whole BBtv team) happiest about our daily video project is the opportunity to collaborate in new ways with creative, fun, insane friends of the blog -- like Johnannes G. and the monochrom crew in Vienna. Their wonderful video contributions have become part of the fabric of our show, and no "favorites" review would be complete without their madcap art-tech-philosophy hijinks.