Friday, July 21, 2006: 3:00 pm (Area "B"): A talk medley from monochrom, a worldwide operating collective from Vienna dealing with technology, art, context hacking, and philosophy which was founded in 1993. They specialize in an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, and political activism. Their mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost "in culture-archaeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment."

This session will be a little tour-de-farce about their projects and political motivation. A joyful bucket full of good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair, condensed into the well known cultural technique of a gala show.

Among their projects, monochrom has released a leftist retro-gaming project, established a one baud semaphore line through the streets of San Francisco, started an illegal space race through Los Angeles, buried people alive in Vancouver, and cracked the hierarchies of the art system with the Thomann Project. In Austria they ate blood sausages made from their own blood in order to criticize the grotesque neoliberal formation of the world economy. Sometimes they compose melancholic pop songs about dying media and they have hosted the first annual festival concerned with cocktail robotics. At the moment they're planning a conference about pornography as one of the driving forces of technological innovation. They also do international soul trade, propaganda camps, epic puppet theater, aesthetic pregnancy counseling, food catering, and - sorry to mention - modern dance.

Hosted by Johannes Grenzfurthner