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The Guestbar! A tiny, guest-edited blog! Johannes Grenzfurthner Johannes Grenzfurthner is writer, artist and founding member of Vienna/Austria based art-tech-philosophy group monochrom. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. monochrom's mission, its passion and quasi-ontological vocation, is primarily the collection, grouping, registration and querying (liberation?) of the scar tissue represented by everyday cultural artifacts. Pit gallery: This guy carves faces and objects from the seeds of fruit. Hardcore handicraft. Link The Mumford Time Machine: "The Mumford Time Machine is a programmable controller and intervalometer for special photographic effects. It allows you to trip the shutter of your camera or fire an electronic flash at specific intervals or in response to events. These trigger events can be sound, light, motion, or electrical signals." Link Orphan Drift: An artist group active in London and Oslo. Currently working on a mixture of source codes and poetry. >> alien zone- future wants contagious with other dimensions. _ streched light _ mayan calender speed within it is . _pro ducing detail _ vandal to time calender without clock _ . _ zoo(hiatus)] > FAMA; 2p f a-é.chil [pl.pl.play] <> [wa.war.ar][zone][#grey][connect pCCC] Special_Fx: #_$2VOW.ght [third vi94] [c-funny teeth] [.tmp if.txt][invisible] << (via rebel:art) Link Bellymasks? Quote: "A bellymask is an heirloom sculpture created right on your pregnant torso in a simple one-hour process. Made of plaster gauze, it is an exact replica of your pregnant form." Link UK Patent Application No. GB2272154: A ladder to enable spiders to climb out of a bath. Link Fair cake-cutting procedure: NY University professor Steven Brams and his team developed a political-economic theory for efficiently sharing out a cake. Link Making Snow: On the intellectual property rights of snowmakers. (via IPKat) Link Free Bitflows: In early June 2004 a digital culture event will be held in Vienna to examine the theories and practices for making new cultures of access viable. The problem is clear, but not the solution. As some means of production are becoming as cheap as to be practically freely accessible (last year's computer equipment, software, basic Internet access), a new question confronts independent cultural producers: "how can we organize access to cultural works to match the new freedom of production?" Please propose presentations for the conference and themes for the workshops or submit works for the exhibition, or apply for a residency. Link The Awful German Language: This is a classic by Mark Twain. I'm a native speaker of German. And I agree. Totally. Link "Frequency Analysis of English Vocabulary and Grammar": Based on the LOB Corpus by Stig Johansson and Knut Hofland (OUP, 1989, ISBN 0-19-8242212-2); gives the top eighteen English words and their frequencies... Link Arcade History Database: Great arcade video games database. Link Noise and Talk: It is not all too long ago that 24-hour-a-day broadcasting was something unknown in Central Europe. Sometime after the last talk show, the late film or the news came the inevitable nightly signoff. Snow. I remember from my childhood how that was a moment of terrifying stillness and clarity. [...] One of my latest rants. Link Dio for America: America's self-acclaimed "most enduring and well regarded heavy metal vocalist" wants to run for presidency. Of course it's a spoof. But to quote DaddyD: "It would be fun to see hordes of satans minions united in the cause of universal healthcare and same sex marriages." (via DaddyD) Link Killer Fonts: Psst. Are you interested in computer fonts in serial killer's handwriting? Link Gelatin: The members of Gelatin combo do projects like the 'Human Elevator' (strong men were needed to man a scaffolding three stories tall; guests would enter at ground level, be grabbed by buff arms and passed up, hurtling to the top and be dropped on the roof of an apartment building) or the 'The B-Thing' (in 2000 they constructed an improvised balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center) or 'Tierfick' (a softcore video where they shag preparation animals in sailor outfit). But see for yourself. Link Cryptographever: Secret messages are everywhere. Do you understand? *Everywhere!* Here is the prove. Cryptographever is an on-line application which lets you find hidden messages in webpages published on the net. Link Mixmaster: Simple idea. Take two websites and merge them. One site provides the web appearance, one site provides the content. Applied surrealism. Link Dyne:bolic GNU/Linux: I happen to know some folks of the Dyne network and they're doing a great job. Dyne:bolic is a live bootable distribution, an operating system which works directly from the CD without the need to install or change anything on the hard disk. It is user-friendly, recognizes your hardware devices (sound, video, firewire, and USB), and offers a vast range of software for multimedia production, streaming, 3D modeling, photo, peer-to-peer filesharing, Web browsing and publishing, word processing, email, encryption, and networking. It does automatic clustering, joining the CPU power between any other dyne:bolic on the local network, and works on modded XBOX consoles as well. Link The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class: A Cautionary Tale by Dion Dennis (Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Bridgewater State College). Published on ctheory. Link MakulaTure: In cooperation with Australian scientists, Austrian artist Robert Jelinek will reconstruct the pheromone scent (musk extract) of the Tasmanian tiger (extinct since 1936), nasally resettle it in the flora and fauna of Australia and Tasmania, and utilize it as a territorial scent fence for farmers. Link (scroll down page for English translation) Kingdom: You may have come across the name Lars von Trier in connection with his activities as a filmmaker. The Danish director has made movies like "Dancer in the Dark" (with Björk) or "Dogville" (with Nicole Kidman). I'd like to seize the opportunity of being the Boing Boing guestblogger to present one of my all-time favourite TV series: "Kingdom". Lars von Trier directed the extraordinary series (1994-1997) and if you haven't seen it yet you should definitely get your hands on it - trust me! "Kingdom" has a unique look and a unique blend of horror and humour. A crossover of hospital series, ghost story, experimental film and smouldering comedy. Actually, I'm unhappy with the term "crossover", but "mixture", "hybrid" or "crossbreed" don't work either. I'm not sure what kind of genre Lars von Trier created with this work but I disagree with the common reflex to compare it to Lynch's "Twin Peaks". Both concepts are "outsiderish" or "strange" on a mass market level, but they are - in my humble opinion - different in almost any way. What more can I tell you? Expect malpractice suits and seances, severed heads and Volvos, liver transplants and divining rods, a back-stabbing Swedish neuroscientist and a female doctor giving birth to Mister Udo Kier. Provocative, entertaining, witty. Period. Kingdom I (DVD): Link Kingdom II (DVD): Link Pinhole Photography: Artist Justin Quinnell takes pinhole photographs from inside his mouth. Pure magic... Link The Internet Pathology Laboratory for Medical Education: This site invites you to solve "The Case of the Week". Will the real forensic pathologist please stand up? Link Aresa Biodetection: Aresa is working on a biodetection system able to identify the presence of specific components in the soil. The technology being developed is based on genetically modified plants that are able to change colour from green to red when growing nearby specific compounds. If it works out Aresa will present a plant that can detect explosives (such as landmines and unexploded ordnance) or heavy metals just by growing. Link Portraits of Taliban: A collection of astounding portraits of Taliban by Afghan photographers in Kandahar after the fall of the Taliban regime in 2002. Considering Taliban interpretation of Islamic rules, photography was illegal. But when passport photography was reallowed Taliban would ask for some pictures, secretly taken in the backroom of the studio. Link Saving One Life: Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence as redemptive memory of things. A tentative exploration of affinities between Steven Spielberg’s and Siegfried Kracauer’s conceptions of cinema and memory / by Drehli Robnik. Link Madonna Wannabe: On video conferencing, music and sadism. Ouch. (via DaddyD) Link WIMP (Windows Interface Manipulation Program) is a program for creating full-screen visual animations synchronized with sound in real time. WIMP utilizes - and exploits - the GUI of the Windows operating system. WIMP can be used as a VJ tool, a screensaver, a cool grafix generator or as a piece of conceptual art. Clever, elegant, ironic software by Victor Laskin and Alexei Shulgin. Link Silicon Zoo: Putting computer chips under the microscope can show you some very interesting creatures hiding there. Complex, beautiful designs of integrated circuitry carefully compsed by some creative chip designers. Link Invaders: Press Space to play. (Yes, Sir!) Link Cryo: Just found this frosty case modding project. Maybe it already was in the glorious blogosphere charts for over twelve months and I didn't realize it... anyway. I definitely *love* it. Build a cryogenic chamber for Lego figures out of your mouse. Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 3:44:16 AM | permalink "Discipline Design: The Rise of Media Philosophy": An Email Exchange with Frank Hartmann (Vienna), by Geert Lovink Link Fat Beatz of the Periphery: The global spread of hip hop culture and art. Article by Justin Hoffmann in the Viennese political art magazine 'Springerin'. Link to Fat Beatz Link to Springerin frontpage Church Sign Generator: Fantasy, unfold! Link "Painting as Ogress": Séamus Kealy is a Canadian artist and curator. I first met him last summer when he was artist in residence at the Museumsquartier Vienna, where we happen to have our monochrom office. What can I say? Kealy's paintings are not antimodern nor postmodern. They function as a side step of the modern, a hybrid. But see for yourself ... Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 5:50:46 AM | permalink Karin Frank: The themes that Austrian sculptural artist Karin Frank deals with are by no means scandalous: there is a lot of shitting, mountains, a lot of lovemaking, there are portrayals. But be careful: Freudian slippery when wet. Link "Some Code to Die for: On the Birth of the Free Software Movement in 1887": monchrom satellite Leo Findeisen publishes his text on our server. He compares the "Old Codes" of natural languages to the "New Codes" of today, which are programming languages. To help us understand the mechanisms through which New Codes originate, grow and thrive (or do not), he examines the history of two natural languages that developed through an Open Source mechanism: Volapük and Esperanto. (Text in English/Esperanto/German) Link Jörg Piringer: Jörg is dealing with language art, good ol’ neo-cut-up, kleptopoetry, time based literature and audiovisual interactive poetry stuff. But to quote Jörg: "You don't have to call it poetry if the term shocks you." Additionally, Jörg is part of the first Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 6:05:02 AM | permalink Capsaicin: capsaicin is the chemical found in peppers which causes a burning sensation. In an attempt to make products hotter than plain peppers, scientists use a process to extract capsaicin from the rest of the pepper. The heat of capsaicin is measured in Scoville Units. Scoville Unit Measuring was invented in 1912 by Wilbur L. Scoville, a pharmacologist of the Parke-Davis Company. It is a measurement that involves adding sugar to a solution until one can no longer taste the pepper. Jalapeno peppers measure around 5,000 units. The hottest pepper ever tested, the Red Savina, tested at 577,000 units. Pure capsaicin is estimated at around 16 million units. You want something like that on your burger? Really? You asked for it… Link posted by johannes grenzfurthner at 5:32:41 AM | permalink Guestbar Archives

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