Please don’t take my negative comments out of context and think I’m one of those expatriate Viennese that likes to suck up the resources while constantly slagging the town and its inhabitants. However, I wanted to write down what happened to me today and point at it in the future and say, “see this? This here is a typical Vienna experience.” And just to be fair, this story has a quintessential Vienna happy ending.

So, let’s say I needed a medically-related device or supply for my daughter. I was told to go to a chain of medical supply stores where they carry said supplies. I was told by my doctor to get a specific size of this supply and that it was very important that I get that specific size.

I head off with my infant daughter, my wife, my toddler child in a stroller, pushing through the cold rain. We arrive on Mariahilferstraße, enter the store — let’s call it “B” and are quickly given what we need. We notice the size, which is not the size we need, and say, “is it possible to get the specific size we want?”
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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.

[taugen; Viennese slang: to dig/love/adore something]

Special Guest Hosts: Nikita Chrusov and Gennadyi Moloshnikov (from Soviet Unterzoegersdorf)
Special Guests: c-base team, Emmanuel Goldstein, Jason Brown, Evelyn Fürlinger and many more.

Link

The electronics hackers at the Metalab love blinking things, something that’s reflected in the majority of ongoing and past projects. They will present and demo a selection of projects, as well as giving them a thorough technical dissection.

Examples of projects that might be presented are:
o Large FPGA based LED matrix
o The Metasign
o DMX-based RGB ceiling illumination
o Misc. magic POV-based (Persistance of Vision) LED shifters
o Blitzenlights
o LED wall clock

For more information on ongoing electronics projects at the Metalab, see http://metalab.at/wiki/Kategorie:WhateverLab.

Hands on! The photons are yours!

Thursday, September 20. 3 PM @ Metalab, Vienna.

Modern techno-mythologies assume that more information and more connections will literally make more sense, extending all the way to the post-human desire to transcend the meat entirely and evolve into pure code. But even before porn and spam turned obfuscation into a profitable business model, the noise and bugs of the meat were already embedded in the code. From the supernatural mass murder which inspired the Arts of Memory to the atomic alien conspiracies that spawned the Web, information technology has always been paranoid.
This talk covers several thousand years of information technology, focusing on strange threads of symptom and haunting woven into the history of mnemotechnics. How does ancient gnostic cosmology influence the way we use computers? How did magicians, junkies and sexual deviants give us computers, programming and rocket science? How did a cave in Kentucky became the blueprint of cyberspace? How did a moth presage y2k and terrorist paranoia? How is the crashed flying saucer at Roswell tied to the origins of hypertext?
These weird errors and coincidences cannot be cleansed from the history of our memory machines, because memory itself is buggy. It operates by associative logic, making unexpected squirms and jumps, revealing poetic truths about the world without concern for linear reason. We cannot escape into the clean world of information and code because the messy conspiratorial logic of sex-dirt is in fact the paranoid logic of code.
All of this will be examined through the gnostic allegory of the 1983 Disney movie, Tron.

Jason Brown (from Los Angeles) is an ambient noisemaker, constellation manipulator, and paranoid historiographer.

Wednesday, September 19. 8 PM @ Metalab, Vienna.

Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices such as guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators. Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with “bent” instruments.

Jörg Piringer currently lives in Vienna, Austria. Member of the Institute For Transacoustic Research. Member of the Vegetable Orchestra (Das Erste Wiener Gemüseorchester). Radio artist. Sound and Visual Poet. Musician. Computer science.

Wednesday, September 19. 3 PM @ Metalab, Vienna.

“Freedom Downtime” is a 2001 documentary film sympathetic to the convicted computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, directed by Emmanuel Goldstein and produced by 2600 Films.

After the screening there will be a public discussion with Emmanuel Goldstein.

Emmanuel Goldstein is the editor and cofounder of 2600, which has been publishing since 1984. He traces his hacker roots to his college days at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the late 1970s. His passions include urban exploration, mind exploration, and space exploration.

Tuesday, September 18. 8 PM @ Metalab, Vienna.

A workshop with members of the c-base crew.

For more than twelve years, a diverse community of artists, hackers and generally crazy people have been excavating and reconstructing artefacts of the crashed space station c-base. We will give a short introduction to the history of the reconstruction project, highlight experiences gained and then exhibit the latest result of our archeological work: the famous multi-touch console MTC. Using the MTC as an example, we will talk about the process of reconstruction, the technologies discovered and future possible excavation plans. The second part of the workshop will offer the opportunity to play with the artefact and write your own application or demo for it.

More information about the c-base can be found at www.c-base.org. You can find a description of the MTC here: www.multitouch.de.

Tuesday, September 18. 3 PM @ Metalab, Vienna.

On Friday, 14th of September a happy anniversary party will be celebrated in quartier21. See the Mitchel Brothers at FM4 Stage, join Monochrom’s Photoshooting for Sojwet-Unterzögersdorf II, visit the new net.culture.lab and net.culture.space, Subotron’s „from PONG to PS3″, and get in touch with people from Transforming Freedom and Quintessenz.

Check out details.

The second annual paraflows festival for digital art and cultures establishes in Vienna a new festival tradition. As an annual fixture between the Ars Elektronica and the Steirischer Herbst, paraflows functions both as a platform for the young local net art and net culture scene and as an interface to the more famous domestic and international positions within media art.

UN_SPACE is the title of this year’s paraflows festival - taking place for the second time already. The topic is the exploration of inaccessible, invisible, theoretical, and immaterial spaces.

Link

Charles Michael “Chuck” Palahniuk is an American satirical novelist and freelance journalist of Ukrainian ancestry born in Pasco, Washington and now living in Vancouver, Washington. He is best known for the award-winning novel Fight Club, which was later made into a film directed by David Fincher. He has one of the largest centralized followings of any author on the Internet, based around his official website.

11th September 8pm
Rabenhof