(That
is what hydrogen atoms are capable of when you give them 15
billion years to evolve.)
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. monochrom has existed in
this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
[more]
[deutsch]
Our news feed, shoggoths. Our mission is culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets)
of ideology and entertainment. [atom/rss/archive]
Antonio Gramsci is a giant of Marxian thought and one of the world’s greatest cultural critics. Antonio A. Santucci is perhaps the world's preeminent Gramsci scholar. Monthly Review Press is proud to publish, for the first time in English, Santucci's masterful intellectual biography of the great Sardinian scholar and revolutionary.
Gramscian terms such as "civil society" and "hegemony" are much used in everyday political discourse. Santucci warns us, however, that these words have been appropriated by both radicals and conservatives for contemporary and often self-serving ends that often have nothing to do with Gramsci’s purposes in developing them. Rather what we must do, and what Santucci illustrates time and again in his dissection of Gramsci's writings, is absorb Gramsci’s methods. These can be summed up as the suspicion of "grand explanatory schemes," the unity of theory and practice, and a focus on the details of everyday life. With respect to the last of these, Joseph Buttigieg says in his Nota: "Gramsci did not set out to explain historical reality armed with some full-fledged concept, such as hegemony; rather, he examined the minutiae of concrete social, economic, cultural, and political relations as they are lived by individuals in their specific historical circumstances and, gradually, he acquired an increasingly complex understanding of how hegemony operates in many diverse ways and under many aspects within the capillaries of society."
Antonio Gramsci
by Antonio A. Santucci
Preface by Eric J. Hobsbawm
Foreword by Joseph A. Buttigieg
Translated by Graziella DiMauro with Salvatore Engel-DiMauro
ISBN: 978-1-58367-210-5
$15.95 paperback
208 pp.
June 2010
The concerns in the particular NEJM case were clear: the wife had recently suffered irreversible brain damage as the result of a heart attack, life support was removed, and then the husband asked to have the respirator turned back on (yes, turned back on) to keep his wife alive long enough to have the hormone injections put into her necessary for the harvesting of her eggs. Luckily, the medical team did not accede to his request.
Why?
According to the NEJM article, the patient had never clearly expressed such wishes, nor had the husband. Until now. Moreover, she was on oral contraceptive pills to prevent pregnancy. No advance directive existed--not that it would have likely covered posthumous reproduction!
So what could have ever justified such a case as this? In my mind, nothing. But could there be such a case of posthumous egg harvesting, of course. In a case where a married woman suffers a tragic, sudden, life-threatening event and where she had previously expressed to her partner/husband/family the strong desire to have a child, one could strongly argue for the posthumous harvesting of her eggs.
We've been thinking it for two long years.
All of us. Gnawing our cheeks at night, clutching at sweaty sheets, our
faces hollow and gray, our once-bright eyes dimmed by the pain of too
many questions. Sometimes we cry out, en masse, to a faceless god and a
cold, indifferent universe that holds its secrets close. What... rasps the death rattle of our collective sanity. What is the lubrication level of Samantha Jones's 52-year-old vagina? Has
the change of life dulled its sparkle? Do its aged and withered depths
finally chafe from the endless pounding, pounding, pounding—cruel
phallic penance demanded by the emotionally barren sexual compulsive
from which it hangs? If I do not receive an update on the deep, gray caverns of Jones, I shall surely die!
Please don't die. The answer is... fine. Samantha's vagina is doing
fine. She rubs yams on it, okay? She takes 48 vagina vitamins a day. It
accepts unlimited male penises with the greatest of ease. Now let us
never speak of it again.
Marine Phytoplankton Declining: Striking Global Changes at the Base of the Marine Food Web
A new article published in the 29 July issue of the journal Nature reveals for the first time that microscopic marine algae known as "phytoplankton" have been declining globally over the 20th century. Phytoplankton forms the basis of the marine food chain and sustains diverse assemblages of species ranging from tiny zooplankton to large marine mammals, seabirds, and fish. Says lead author Daniel Boyce, "Phytoplankton is the fuel on which marine ecosystems run. A decline of phytoplankton affects everything up the food chain, including humans."
Using an unprecedented collection of historical and recent oceanographic data, a team from Canada's Dalhousie University documented phytoplankton declines of about 1% of the global average per year. This trend is particularly well documented in the Northern Hemisphere and after 1950, and would translate into a decline of approximately 40% since 1950. The scientists found that long-term phytoplankton declines were negatively correlated with rising sea surface temperatures and changing oceanographic conditions.
Apparently Commodore-Amiga owed $10M for patent infringement. Because of that, the US government wouldn't allow any CD-32's into the USA. And because of that, the Phillipines factory seized all of the CD-32's that had been manufactured to cover unpaid expenses. And that was the end. Commodore-Amiga had basically gambled everything on the CD-32 being the platform that would save the company. And when they couldn't bring any into the US, it was clearly Game Over.
So, the thing that finally brought the original Amiga house down was the
XOR patent!
Applesphere, byebye: US Library of Congress says it is legal to jailbreak phones
Apple likes to maintain tight control over what programs can appear on the iPhone — a task that just became a little bit harder.
The Library of Congress, which has the power to define exceptions to an important copyright law, said on Monday that it was legal to bypass a phone’s controls on what software it will run to get "lawfully obtained" programs to work.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, had asked for that exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the so-called jailbreaking of iPhones and other devices.
"This is a really important victory for iPhone owners," said Corynne McSherry, a senior staff lawyer with the foundation. "People who want to tinker with their phones and move outside of the Applesphere now have the ability to legally do that."
Haitian Peasants March against Monsanto Company for Food and Seed Sovereignty
On June 4th about ten thousand Haitian peasants marched to protest U.S.-based Monsanto Company's 'deadly gift' of seed to the government of Haiti. The seven-kilometer march from Papaye to Hinche—in a rural area on the central plateau—was organized by several Haitian farmers' organizations that are proposing a development model based on food and seed sovereignty instead of industrial agriculture. Slogans for the march included "long live native maize seed" and "Monsanto's GMO & hybrid seed violates peasant agriculture."
The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. About 65 percent of Haiti's population lives in rural areas as subsistence farmers. On January 12 2010, a devastating earthquake leveled Haiti's capital city Port au Prince, and 800,000 urban refugees migrated to rural areas. According to Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, coordinator of the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP) and a member of La Via Campesina's international coordinating committee, "there is presently a shortage of seed in Haiti because many rural families used their maize seed to feed refugees."
With sales of $11.7 billion in 2009, U.S.-based transnational corporation Monsanto Company is the world's largest seed company, controlling one-fifth of the global proprietary seed market and 90 percent of seed patents from agricultural biotechnology. In May Monsanto announced that it had delivered 60 tons of hybrid seed maize and vegetables to Haiti, and over 400 tons of its seed (worth $4 million) will be delivered during 2010 to 10,000 farmers. The United Parcel Service is providing transport logistics, while Winner—a $127 million project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and focused on ''agricultural intensification'—is distributing the seed. Monsanto stated that it made the decision to donate seed to Haiti at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland: "CEO Hugh Grant and Executive Vice President Jerry Steiner attended the event and had conversations with attendees about what could be done to help Haiti." It is unclear whether any Haitians were included in the conversations in Davos.
Some have charged that the Monsanto representative in Haiti is Jean-Robert Estimé, who served as foreign minister during the brutal 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship. While Monsanto vehemently denies this claim, Estimé is included in an email exchange about the donation between Elizabeth Vancil, Director of Global Development Partnerships at Monsanto and Emmanuel Prophete, a Haitian agronomist working for the Minister of Agriculture. The domain for Estimé's email address is Winner (www.winner.ht), which implies he works for the U.S. government.
The Haitian rural organizations consider Monsanto's seed donation part of a broader strategy of U.S. economic and political imperialism. "The Haitian government is using the earthquake to sell the country to the multinationals," stated Jean-Baptiste. Vancil stated that opening up Haitian markets to Monsanto's products "would be good."
The UK budget, and the next five years of government policy, means to persuade, or force, the workless into work. A new study examines the value of work, not to a company or organisation, but to society as a whole.
Imagine for a moment we asked a crucial, and crucially different, economic question – not what are you paid, but what is the social return on the investment that is your pay? What do you contribute to society in exchange for your pay? It's a reversed version of the usual monetary value question: what do you contribute to shareholders for your cost?
Three UK researchers, Eilis Lawlor, Helen Kersley and Susan Reed, overseen by the New Economic Foundation, did some original work on inequalities by comparing the remuneration of professions at the top and bottom of the pay scale with the social value of their jobs. They decided that a worker at a recycling plant, on £6.10 an hour, was quite valuable as "each pound spent as salary will generate £12 worth of value for the whole community". But "while collecting salaries of between £500,000 and £10m, leading City bankers destroy £7 of social value for every pound in value they generate." The trio foresaw that the global result of the best-paid activities can be negative.
What do these words and phrases have in common? Friend, Google, TiVo, log in, contact, barbecue, unlike, concept, text, Photoshop, leverage, party, Xerox, reference, architect, parent, improv, transition, diligence, host, chair, gift, heart, impact?
They've all been declared--by someone,
somewhere, whether a usage expert or just a self-appointed language
cop--"not verbs." It doesn't matter whether they're useful, interesting,
or entertaining as verbs; to many people, if a word began its life as a
noun, then "verbing" it (like I did there) is just wrong.
This visceral reaction is the motivating force behind the recently popular loginisnotaverb.com, one man's impassioned plea against this kind of verbing. The site's elaborate (and funny) arguments against login's
verb status really boil down to a simple denial. "I will repeat the
important part for clarity: 'login' is not a verb. It's simply not," he
writes.
The history of
English, however, suggests that the language is remarkably flexible in
terms of what can be verbed. Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a
verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their
more traditional roles. It's easy to think of scenarios where "She me'd him too much and they broke up" and "My boss tomorrowed the meeting again" make sense.
Jane Goodall's Primate Life: A Journey Through the Jungle
In 1960, she began studying chimpanzees, notebook in hand—a long way from today's computers and satellites. Jane Goodall reflects on 50 years of primate research, and the cast of characters she grew to love.
I remember them all so, so well. Goliath, who lost his alpha position when Mike, using his superior intelligence, learned to enhance his dominance displays by hitting and kicking empty four-gallon tin cans ahead of him. William, the clown, who once stole a blanket, dragged it up the hillside, then draped it over his head and felt around him like a child who has been blindfolded.
Is it really 50 years ago that I stepped ashore, for the first of who knows how many hundreds of times, onto the sandy beach of Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, now Gombe National Park? Has half a century passed since I saw, for the first time, a wild chimpanzee feeding high in a palm tree? It seems almost impossible to believe.
Johannes Grenzfurthner from Austrian mad arts collective Monochrom
closed out this year's HOPE conference in NYC with a dramatic
presentation about, um, Wikileaks. And unicorns.
Caterpillars Crawl Like None Other: Unique Means of Animal Locomotion Has Implications for Robotics, Human Biomechanics
Biologists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences studying crawling caterpillars have reported a unique "two-body" system of locomotion that has not previously been reported in any animal.
In an article published online July 22 in the journal Current Biology, the Tufts-led team reported that the gut of the crawling tobacco hawkmoth caterpillar (Manduca sexta) moves forward independently of and in advance of the surrounding body wall and legs, rather than moving along with them. Collaborating with Tufts were researchers from Virginia Tech and Argonne National Laboratory.
"Understanding this novel motion system may help efforts to design soft-bodied robots," said the article's senior author, Barry Trimmer, Tufts professor of biology and Henry Bromfield Pearson Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences. "It may also prompt re-examination of the potential role soft tissues play in biomechanical performance of humans and other animals."
Beijing's new view of the West lies in the notion that the U.S. is no longer indispensable to China
Each week adds a new item to the growing list of grievances between the United States and China. The value of China's currency, arms to Taiwan, human rights in Tibet, carbon emissions, military spending, sanctions on Iran, cyber attacks, and, of course, North Korea have all made headlines in the past few months. But there are far more profound problems that tend to get covered up by this landslide of daily disagreement, problems that raise the specter of a new kind of cold war. The most fundamental is Beijing's newfound belief that there has been a substantial shift in the balance of power within its relationship with America, and that the United States is no longer indispensable to China’s development. Added to that is China’s deepening commitment to a state-driven form of capitalism that increasingly pits the two counties in a zero-sum competition for resources and wealth.
There is still considerable mutual dependence in U.S.-Chinese relations, grounded mainly in the complex commercial ties of the two nations. But there are also risks that are more dangerous for Washington than anything produced by the long U.S.-Soviet stalemate. The Berlin Wall separated East and West, but it also acted as a kind of shock absorber, ensuring that economic bankruptcy on the Communist side had little impact on the freer world. There is no such buffer between China and the United States. The financial crisis of the past twenty months has produced significant aftershocks in China. And in the coming decade, economic developments inside China will have profound implications for America's financial well-being—and, therefore, its security.
Developed as a protection against dust which was particularly
threatening to early microprocessors, the Gesundheit Radio sneezes every
six months to expel potentially damaging material from it‘s interior. A
bellows system extracts the dust from inside the unit, blowing waste
from two nostrils located on the front.
The Gesundheit Radio is part of the Attenborough Design Group, a
fictional organisation charged with investigating the use of behaviours
found in nature to defend products from threats in their everyday
environment.
As an aside, Gesundheit is one of two German words most Americans
learn in Kindergarten. The other is "Kindergarten".
Pages translated
into English by
Melinda Richka
David Fine
Aileen Derieg
Sharon Bradley
Bre Pettis
Lilly Lotus
Sean Bonner
David Bovill
Patricia Futterer
Jake Appelbaum
Dave Dempsey
Evelyn Fürlinger
Christopher Barber
Douglas Irving Repetto
Francesca Birks
Cory Doctorow
Walter Seidl
Jonathan Quinn
Daniel Eberharter
Stephen Zepke
Georg Cracked
Johannes Grenzfurthner
Leo Findeisen
Violet Blue
Upcoming performances & lectures in English language
(rss)
paraflows 2010: "Mind and Matter" What role does hardware play for media infrastructure – how is the net set up, what are the real pillars on which virtuality rests? How does the sculptural process look like, from a technological point of view? What are the effects of technological prospects on physical representation? What are the challenges that digital art must face, when it comes to conserving its works? Additionally to the applications in question, the corresponding hardware needs to be preserved as well. But how does time affect technology-based works, their conditions of production and their archives? Mind and body are inextricably tied to each other, yet we are tempted to regard mental processes as independent of their bodily basis. Can thoughts, personality or intelligence exist without a body? Or how does the aesthetic image of technology relate to its context, what kind of interconnections are made? Our exhibition MIND AND MATTER will present works from the very beginning of media art and also give an overview of current developments that combine programmes with sculpture. September 9 thru October 10, 2010. In Vienna at Künstlerhaus, Raum D and at Metalab.
Arse Elektronika 2010: "Space Racy" Love hotels. Swinger club design. Phallic architecture. The gentrification of Times Square, kicking out all the peep shows, and similar anti-sex gentrifications and battles. Kids making out in the back seats of cars, and people fucking in parks. Housing for unconventional family units. Augmented reality sex spaces. Furniture for sex. Room design. Creating new environments. Gendered spaces, and gender in the creation of space. Architecture by women, and the potential for the construction of a feminist architecture. Actively gender-segregated spaces, as both empowering and oppressing. Queer-segregated spaces, similarly. The acts of human intimacy, sexual intercourse, and procreation in weightlessness and the extreme environments of space. Erotic space tourism. The visibility of sex, genders, and relationship structures in various spaces. Spaces of sexual control and permissiveness. Sexual subcultures as spaces of social division. Spatial enforcement of relationship structures and gendered power structures. Geotagging as an expression for kinks. The sexual reading of architecture, especially around historical and modern styles and concerning ornament and detail. The eroticization of buildings -- architecture for whorehouses, the Las Vegas strip, people who want to sleep with buildings. What makes design "sexy" and the construction of "sexy" as an architectural category as a comment on late heteronormativity. The terabyte gloryhole. The space in which the male gaze occurs and the space it defines. Heterosexism, misogyny, and heterocentrism reinforce the dominant cultural structure and contribute to the oppression of large sectors of society. Sexuality, sex, gender, and related constructs are heavily implicated in and reproduce space, and are also constrained and restricted by it and by heterosexism. Let's explore this space of interactions! Various locations in San Francisco, USA; September 30 thru October 3, 2010.
monochrom @ Drumbeat Festival 2010 monochrom and hacbbus.at at Drumbeat Festival 2010
november 3-5, 2010 in barcelona, spain
Roboexotica 2010 Roboexotica is the annual festival where scientists, researchers, computer experts and artists from all over the world build cocktail robots and discuss technological innovation, futurology and science fiction. Cheers! Roboexotica is coproduction of monochrom, Shifz and the Bureau for Philosophy. December 2-5, 2010 in Vienna, Austria.
monochrom at CCC Finowfurt 2011 we will attend Chaos Communications Camp at the former military airport Finowfurt (near Berlin) - in our hackbus. From August 10 to 14, 2011.
Electronic feedback is Electronic
feedback is Electronic feedback Postal address: monochrom, Quartier 21/Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz
1, A-1070 Vienna, Austria/Europe
Vox : +43-676-783 1453 // Fax: +43-1-952 33 84
. . . . . . .
. . .
For
visitors: It is left up to each individual to decide how to spend his or her free
time. --- For journalists: Be aware of your position and
act according to a catalogue of ethical values of your own design. Send
it to moral AT monochrom.at
--- For art theorists: Interpret this site according
to form and content using the following concepts: intercontextuality,
processualisation, deconstruction, actualisation, contingency, deregulation,
immanence critique, non-disciplinary deportment, interfacing, reception
coding, flagellate protozoan. Send your contribution to flagrant AT monochrom.at