Tag Archives: talk

Sierra Zulu: Johannes Grenzfurthner at Duncan/Channon in SFO

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Director Johannes Grenzfurthner is guest star at Duncan/Channon’s Toast of the Tip!

He’s an artist, writer, curator, director, professor, all-around instigator, and founder of Monochrom, the notorious Viennese art/technology/philosophy powerhouse. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Slashdot, Boing Boing, LA Times, NPR, Gizmodo, Wired. He (or his lookalike Comrade Chrusov) have been spotted at SXSW, TEDxVienna, Maker Faire, Google’s Tech Talks, Ars Electronica, Mozilla Drumbeat Barcelona and underground hacker conferences around the world. From translating dense political philosophy into internet memes to composing pop musicals about banking software to running the first (and, inevitably, leading) festival concerned with cocktail robotics, Johannes and Monochrom constantly seek the right medium for their message(s). Among other projects, they’ve established a one-baud semaphore line through the streets of San Francisco, buried couples alive in plush surveillant coffins and cracked the hierarchies of the art market with a series of elaborate pranks. Now they are taking on the silver screen with the Kickstarter-funded story of Sierra Zulu, the last Soviet micro-state.

As our first Toast of the Tip honoree of the fall, Grenzfurthner will share his global adventures in subverting subversion and discuss some of the oddities of storytelling and filmmaking in a digital age.

Wednesday, 26 September 2012

Beer, wine, snacks, 5:30 pm

Speaker, 6:00 pm

RSVP REQUIRED

There will be a list. To be included, RSVP by the morning of 26th to: moc.nonnahcnacnudnull@pvsr

Sierra Zulu @ HOPE Conference in NYC

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Our director Johannes Grenzfurthner will give a talk at HOPE Conference in NYC in July 2012: How To Create A Feature Film About The Digital Age — And Why That’s Pretty Hard

Movies are exciting. Things crash and burn. Bolts and fists fly. There are bangs and kabooms. People go to the cinemas in order to experience new worlds. But cinema is about to lose its prime source of narrative, having so far tethered to physical action that can be filmed. Cinema needs tempo, needs speed. The “movement-image” (Gilles Deleuze) depends on physical action onto which the cameras can point. Yet in contrast, the real world of non-cinema is losing physical action day by day. It is a time of abstract, optically unpresentable processes in networks and data systems. This regress of visual displayability is rather daft. Cinema has lived well on it for more than a hundred years. It’s easy to create a feature film about a bank robbery, but that’s anachronistic. Some of the most important crimes exist as electronic money movements between international stock exchanges. Hollywood cinema on the other hand still hasn’t evolved beyond anything better than banal sequences straight out of an Errol Flynn movie. How can we accurately portray the stories of our (new) world? All those dramas and comedies? All those crimes and stories?
That’s why we at monochom are working on a feature film called SIERRA ZULU. Let me tell you about our challenges and hopes – and why we think you might be able to help us.

July 13, 2012; 9 PM (Room: Dennis, 18th floor of Hotel Pennsylvania, NYC).
Link / HOPE

Sierra Zulu goes Amstetten

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There will be a German language presentation about Sierra Zulu in Amstetten.

Sierra Zulu. Oder: Wie ein belangloses Kuhkaff die Gegenwart retten kann

Eine UN-Friedenstruppe leistet in einem kleinen Lager Dienst im Niemandsland zwischen Europa und dem winzigen Kleinstaat Sowjet-Unterzögersdorf. Ihr Dienst ist langweilig und eintönig, doch als es zu einer Explosion in Sowjet-Unterzögersdorf kommt, wird das Team in eine bizarre Verschwörung aus Industriespionage und politischer Intrige verwickelt, die die Zukunft der Informationsgesellschaft nachhaltig verändern könnte. “Sierra Zulu” – eine politische Groteske.
Johannes Grenzfurthner erzählt über die Entwicklung des Spielfilms “Sierra Zulu”.

May 3, 2012 – 7 PM at Cafe Kuckuck in Amstetten, Lower Austria (as part of Kulturhof Amstetten).