monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
Guilt, stirred up by leftist thinkers, is now de rigueur in the west. But Pascal Bruckner believes our soul-searching is both hypocritical and injurious. Beneath Bruckner’s eloquence is a serious message: we remain prisoners of a white guilt whose victim is its supposed beneficiary. Our guilt, he writes, is actually a means for us to … Read more
Shihui Han of Peking University, China, found activity in brain regions that normally deal with negative emotions and self-awareness are dampened when we process ideas about death. Han and colleagues placed 20 volunteers in functional MRI brain scanners while death-related words, such as graveyard, corpse, behead and slay, flashed up on a screen. Neutral and … Read more
Melinda just posted a pretty cool set of images. It’s a documentation of the initial test-inflation of our giant joint “Pot Tin God”, back in April 2009. Link
The Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms. Water evaporates from the oceans, rains down on the land, pours back to the seas. As … Read more
Apparently Facebook isn’t just for playing MafiaWars anymore. It’s also for finding living unrelated donors to give you their organs. Seriously. The six degrees of separation that we all experience via Facebook makes those who have long been waiting on organ transplant lists feel as though the wait can end if they just reach out … Read more
Christopher Nolan’s Inception may have left us emotionally cold, but it did make our brains overheat. The puzzlelike film is stuffed with so much detail it threatens to collapse in on itself, just like that folding city—while also providing enough material for careful (obsessed?) viewers to excavate several plausible interpretations. Here are some of the … Read more
Emrys Westacott asks a probing question. Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and … Read more