about
monocon is what happens when monochrom builds its own conference and then refuses to behave like a conference.
It is an unconference with open lectures, workshops, presentations, feedback rounds, screenings, walks, improvised rituals, project archaeology and group thinking. The schedule is not carved into institutional marble months in advance. It is assembled by the people who show up, revised as the event progresses, and occasionally held together with duct tape, barbecue smoke and unreasonable enthusiasm.
Press once described the idea as a more relaxed Alpbach. That is not completely wrong, if Alpbach had more photocopied paper, more subcultural science, fewer suits, more strange machines, and a higher probability that someone will turn a half-baked idea into a lecture before lunch.
monocon began in 2018 as a recurring gathering for monochrom, its collaborators and friends. Guests from art, culture, technology, theory and adjacent forms of beautiful trouble have joined the format over the years. Past contributors and participants include people such as Bre Pettis, Daniel Kulla and Thomas Kaestle, alongside many artists, hackers, writers, researchers, filmmakers and local co-conspirators.
what happens there?
monocon is small by design. It is a place for half-hour talks, long discussions, practical workshops, feedback on unfinished projects, speculative lectures, field trips, cooking, noise, jokes, doubt, repairs, and the kind of conversation that usually happens in corridors after the official panel has already failed.
Sometimes it is about art. Sometimes it is about technology. Sometimes it is about agriculture, ghosts, infrastructure, politics, pop culture, games, failed utopias, rural logistics, bodies, media, and the question of whether an idea is brilliant, stupid, or both.
The important thing is not polish. The important thing is friction: different people bringing different obsessions into the same room, garden, shed, park, classroom, kitchen or improvised session board.
where has it happened?
monocon has moved through several Lower Austrian and Viennese locations: Schloss Zeillern, Symposion Lindabrunn, VHS Rudolfsheim, and UZ Lab in Unterzögersdorf. Each location changes the event. A seminar hotel is not a sculpture park. A VHS classroom is not a shed. A rural lab is not a gala. That is the point.
The format treats place as part of the program: the route there, the sleeping arrangements, the weather, the barbecue, the equipment that fails, the room that accidentally becomes perfect.
why unconference?
Because a fixed program is useful, but not always alive. monocon keeps enough structure to begin and enough disorder to let the real topics appear. People arrive with something to show, ask, test, argue, repair, perform or confess. The result is not a product launch and not a retreat. It is a temporary social machine for thinking together.
No admission, but much passion.
