Just Another Working Day
Do you still work? This one was taken in the 15. district, next to the metro exit “Wasserwelten”.
Archive for December, 2006
Erwin Wurm @ MUMOK
Keep a Cool Head… until 11.02.07 at MUMOK.
Friendly Sales People
Yesterday I had a wow-experience with a sales guy at the EMI-store on Kärntnerstraße. I usually avoid this store for its premium prices, but some stuff you’ll only get there.
So I ask for a CD (”The sinking of the Titanic” by Gavin Bryars, if you need to know) and he looks for it in the computer and calls the distro and whatnot. All Bryar’s titles have been delisted by Universal, so no way. He might get another one if he orders it.
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Snow in Vienna
This picture was taken in November this year. We already had some snow. But snow, where did you go? Please come back! Waiting for a white christmas.
Waiting for Saint Privat!
To be honest, I am not that trendy enough to be able to recognise that Saint Privat is the music behind the Wienerin TV advert (”Rokoko”) and another commercial (”Tout les jours”) that is playing on TV. The band is composed of the sultry and pretty mulitilingual Valerie Sadjik and producer Waldeck. She croons in French, German and English. He composes the melody. It is a mixed bag of pop, French chansons, electronic. Mainly lounge pop.
And the funny thing is I like it. Thanks to the Viennese library for letting me discover their music. The band, having received an Amadeus Award a year ago, is unlike the usual stuff I listen from the Viennese radio. I rarely listen to FM4 these days. And, yes, Drahdiwaberl was great and Prof. Stefan Weber is a mad genius, and okay Falco was and still is famous. But so is Christina Stürmer. Don’t start with the Austrian electronic music because I seldom listen to it. Sorry.
Saint Privat is set to celebrate the release of their sophomore album, “Le Superflu” at the Wiener Konzerthaus on the 17th of December, at 8 pm. Tickets start at 22 euros. So secure your rightful seats (or spaces?) now.
Mystery
Since I moved to Vienna, a mystery has haunted me.
I’m riding on the U3 in the direction of Simmering. As I arrive at Stephansplatz, where I will switch to the U1 in the direction of Leopoldau, I observe the following behaviour in certain of my fellow passengers: they run for it.
Initially, I attributed this to the fact that they must simply be the types who are always running for it - always in such a hurry that, to them, it’s worth running for the U1 train just in case one is standing at the platform awaiting some riders to board the carriage.
But then I noticed that, without fail, these runners would make it to the U1 train just as it arrived or was standing with open doors. Somehow, these runners knew that the train was there. And as the train whirred and swooshed into the tunnel and the sign blinked to announce the next wait interval, the runners were smug - a bit sweaty — and en route.
This perplexes me.
I have examined the platform, and I have yet to notice a sign that indicates the time and direction of any U1 trains for passengers disembarking from the U3 trains. I have not figured out any clear visual line of sight that would allow me to see a U1 train on the platform. I have asked others who do not run: how do they know? Nobody has an answer, although some have suggested that the people know the schedule. However, this seems an unsatisfactory answer.
I am a massively efficient commuter. I pre-walk the platform to get myself close to the transfer or exit point. I walk between bus stops to avoid stopping. I like it when I have to run for each transit vehicle on a given commute, because this means I have travelled as quickly as possible and eliminated all platform and Haltstelle waits.
So my question: how do these runners divine the fact that, if they run, they’ll catch the U1? How do these clairvoyant Ubahn riders surpass even the Clydesdale commuter?
Taugshow #9
The flat hierarchies of talk shows are about as subversive as NYC Democrats smoking dope. But count us out! We won’t produce a talk show. Nope. We produce a TAUGSHOW! Which means: we dig it. Our guests are geeks, heretics, and other coevals. 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 prime time TV show.
Location: dietheater/Konzerthaus, Lothrinerstrasse, Vienna.
Friday, December 8, 2006 / 8:00 PM
Guests:
/// V. VALEIn 1977, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti each gave V. Vale, a clerk at City Lights Bookstore, $100 to begin publishing “SEARCH & DESTROY,” now called by Jello Biafra “the best punk magazine ever, combining in-depth interviews, lists and reference material with artist’s photographs and layout.” After eleven issues in a tabloid format, V. Vale launched Adolescent Records and then was the first American hired to start Rough Trade Records U.S.A. He subsequently convinced Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis to back the first issues of “RE/Search” (a pun on Search & Destroy). After three “RE/Search” tabloids, Vale’s publishing took a turn towards a book format, beginning with a ground-breaking, still-classic issue featuring William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Throbbing Gristle. Other early books published by Vale include Mike Bloomfield’s, “Me and Big Joe,” Kathy Acker’s “Great Expectations,” and Terry Wilson & Brion Gysin’s “Here To Go.” At the same time, RE/Search began producing videos, music compilation CDs, and live events and concerts. The RE/Search series includes the “Industrial Culture Handbook” (just re-issued in a beautiful, limited edition hardback), four books involving J.G. Ballard (two recently: “J.G. Ballard Quotes,” and “J.G. Ballard Conversations”), two books involving PRANKS, “Incredibly Strange Films” and “Incredibly Strange Music,” the ground-breaking “Modern Primitives” (credited with “launching” the tattoo/body modification movement), and other volumes of noir historian author Daniel P. Mannix, noir writer Charles Willeford, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch of Graz, Austria, and others. RE/Search’s latest book is “PRANKS 2.” RE/Search is currently producing a series of one-hour interview videos and has finished 20 episodes for San Francisco television (one of which features monochrom founder Johannes Grenzfurthner from Vienna, Austria). RE/Search principals V. Vale and Marian Wallace will be documenting the RoboExotica Conference, December 2006 for their video series.
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/// VIOLET BLUE
Violet Blue is the best-selling, award-winning author and editor of over twenty books on sex and sexuality, two of which have been translated into French, Spanish, Russian and Turkish. Violet is a sex educator who lectures at UC’s and community teaching institutions, and writes about erotica, pornography, sexual pleasure and health. She is a professional blogger and femmebot; a correspondent at Geek Entertainment TV; the sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and blogs for Gawker’s Fleshbot.com and Metroblogging San Francisco. She was Wired’s “sexy geek of 2005″, she has survived being a Dorkbot SF presenter twice, and over ten years at Survival Research Laboratories — where she does robotics, machine maintenance, industrial mechanical fabrication, welding, machine operation and robot performace production. Her podcast Open Source Sex has made iTunes cry for its mommy at least once. To visit her site, remove one item of clothing and click tinynibbles.com.
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/// OLIVER HANGL
Oliver Hangl was born 1968 in Grieskirchen, Austria. Hangl, who originally startet his career as actor and stage designer in 1993, is just as active in performative disciplines and medial spaces as he is in classical fine arts exhibition sites. His current works, which are not tied to one medium, are marked by breaks in reality, doublings, and in between realms. Hangl is involved in a broad range of activites, in which he frequently switches between the positions of artist, actor, producer and/or director.
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/// Visuals:
/// LA TRINCHERA
La Trinchera (the trench) is an Austrian-Mexican sound and projection collective based in Mexico City. La Trinchera found its beginnings in the First “Festival of Improvisation” staged in Mexico City, february 2004. Since then, La Trinchera has operated as generator of impulses, as a “free fire zone” and as a call to experimentation. Risking the clash of individual creative spirit in the immediacy of a visual situation, La Trinchera has successfully brought together more than 20 artists of many diverse world views. Four of them are guests at monochroms taugshow: Rafael Balboa (handmade 16mm film-loops), Manuel Trujillo (handmade 16mm film-loops), Aisel Wicab (handmade slides), Doris Steinbichler (overhead projector).
Everybody’s talking about the weather
But nobody does anything.
Winter is a waste of energy, money and lives tragically claimed by depression. If you want to do something, sign this petition.(Text in German) for the abolition of Winter anywhere below 1000m above the sea level.
The petition will be sent to the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik, which is clearly in charge of the weather here in Austria.
Sign early.
This has been a public service announcement by the society for the championing of lost and even more hopeless causes.
It’s too cold outside.
shoplifting in Austria still under average
The Centre for Retail Research has published a study which gives Austrian shoppers grade A for obeying the laws: Only 438 million € per year are attributed to “leakage” of goods aka shoplifting. That is only 0.96 % of the total turnover of retail industry in Austria. The second best in Europe after the traditionally law-abiding and obedient Swiss with 0.92 %. Germany is runners up at 1.07 %. The highest percentage of shoplifting is in the Czeck Republic (1.42 %), Slovakia (1.42 %) and Hungary (1.38 %).
Personally, I do believe that the “grantig sales people” are a major factor in the equation. Who’d dare to steal in a place where they are afraid to even shop?
Roboexotica 2006 // Festival for Cocktail Robotics
Roboexotica is the first and inevitably leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics.
Until recently, no attempts had been made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out.
Scientists, researchers, computer geeks and artists from all over the world participate to build cocktail robots and discuss about technological innovation, futurology and science fiction.
Participants: V. Vale of RE/Search, Eddie Codel (Geek Entertainment TV), Jacob Appelbaum, Madame Violet Blue and robot masterminds as David Calkins and Kal Spelletich… and many others.
Opening: Tuesday, 5 December 2006, 7 PM, Freiraum/Museumsquartier.
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