Out of their announcement:

The city spreads out before you. Rushing from point to point, lit by the slow strobe of fluorescent buses in dark streets. Stumbling into situations for a stranger’s signature. Fleeing unknown pursuers, breathing hard, admiring the landscape and the multitude of worlds hidden in it.

For one night, drop your relations, your work and leisure activities, and all your usual motives for movement and action, and let yourself be drawn by the attractions of the chase and the encounters you find there.

Try to make it through a series of checkpoints as quickly and as stealthily as possible, while avoiding being caught by chasers. Should you be captured, you become a chaser yourself and have to pursue your former friends and allies. No skates, no bikes, no cars — just your feet and public transport.

Starting point for the Journey will be a shallow pit in Prater, near the tram 1 stop Prater Hauptallee and U2 station Stadion (GPS: 48.20673 / 16.40878; see map).

Join in a free street game of epic proportion; a pursuit across the city in multiple parts – and be sure to wear comfortable shoes & bring water =)

Vienna’s hackerspace, the Metalab, is celebrating it’s 3rd anniversary – and of course, a birthday like this mustn’t pass unnoticed and uncelebrated!

Therefore, the Metalab is inviting to their party on Sat, May 23rd, starting 08 PM, under the motto ‘Stream Punk’ with a live alternative music performance of Pandora’s Hope and a DJ set by the fabulous Drum’n'Bass kids from Gaswerk, accompanied by the finest visuals in town. A midnight special and the meanwhile semi-famous Guitar Hero contest will top the event off.

Three days before this, from Wed 20th (starting at 07 PM – open end) to Fri 22nd respectively, the First Viennese Hackathon will take place at the hackerspace: It’s THE chance to finally focus on that project you wanted to start ages ago and never found the time to finish. More motivation and productivity through the Hackathon group challenge! A more detailed schedule & participants list can be found on Metalab’s Hackathon page.

Additionally, Metalab members will present some of their work and projects at the upcoming exhibition ‘Was bisher geschah’ (What happened so far) from June 11th – 13th.
Opening party: Thursday, June 11th, 06 PM

The address:
Metalab
Rathausstrasse 6
1010 Wien
Map

Have fun! ^^

Organized by Monochrom, SHIFZ and the Bureau for Philosophy, the year 2008 marks the 10th anniversary of the festival, which not only centers on the obvious thematics around robots and drinking culture, but also goes along with a series of panel talks, events and shows.

One of the most interesting and current topics the talks were dealing with certainly was the future of technology and DIY culture. Under the title Back to the Future – of Utopias in Cybernetics and Robotics, international artists, theorists, technologists and hackers discussed the importance of gaining more and more knowledge about (reverse-)engineering consumer electronic products and the change our world is currently undergoing.

The opening party of Roboexotica 2008 started off in front of the MQ, where the 25 foot tall interactive public sound installation RoboVox by media artist Martin Bricelj, speaking out text messages it receives via SMS, was set up.

As for the festival weekend, the exposition involved several recurrent ‘classics’ such as the Robomoji by Robert Martin or the enhanced Chassis by Jon Foote and Al Honig; as well as lots of new, shiny and superb inventions like Liquidator by recurring guest Mikhael a Crest Sator or Sloth by Kal Spelletich, only to name a few.

In the context of Roboexotica, Monochrom’s Taugshow #17 was dedicated to the subject, and held at Vienna’s collaborative technology/new media lab & hackerspace Metalab, featuring Mitch Altman, founder of 3ware and inventor of TV-B-Gone and the Brain Machine; maker/hacker/teacher/artist/podcaster/puppeteer/NYCResistor & Thingiverse co-founder Bre Pettis; SF-based Geek Entertainment TV producer, documentary filmmaker and technologist Eddie Codel, Monochrom’s artist in residence of November; and Krach der Robot, who provided the audience with noisy sounds and self-made attachable mini-antennas.

The official closing event of the Roboexotica 2008 festival took place at the MQ on Sun, Dec. 07th, and Chris Janka ushered the evening with a very special high voltage music show, performed on a Tesla coil connected to his electric guitar, followed by the awards ceremony.

The winners of Roboexotica 2008’s Annual Cocktail Robot Awards, ACRA v10.0, were announced as follows:

5 ‘CLASSIC’ CATEGORIES:
Serving: Fairy Juicer (Mitch Heinrich, David Fine) and Sloth (Kal Spelletich)
Mixing: Construction Wanker and K&K Kavalier Klavier (both exhibits by students of the FH Joannum)
Conversation: Chassis (Jon Foote, Al Honig)
Fire & smoke: Temporarily suspended!
Other achievements: Rim Shot Bot (CTP) and RepRap Shotbot (Marius Kintel, Philipp Tiefenbacher, Bre Pettis)

3 SPECIAL CATEGORIES:
Human subjugation: Gina (students of the FH Joanneum)
Most legally challenging: RoboVox (Martin Bricelj)
Reproducability: Lego Shot Bot (Anthony Fudd)

LIMES:
Most spectacularily breaking robot: Sloth (Kal Spelletich)
Stickiest, ickiest: Globo (Johannes Grenzfurthner)
Most displaced in cocktail environment: Drill-pro-mill (students of the FH Joanneum)
Most politically and genderifically incorrect: Construction Wanker (students of the FH Joanneum)

Some of the exhibits (unfortunately lacking US contestants who already had to leave home) will still be on display until Fri, Dec. 12th (closing at noon) at the MQ, so if you haven’t been there yet, go have a look!

Also, on the occasion of the event’s 10th anniversary, the retrospective Roboexotica in the form of a paperback was published by Edition Mono and can be purchased via Amazon.

* * *

More info and useful links:
More photos on Flickr
Pre-Roboexotica 2008 post by Scott Beale on Laughing Squid
Post-Roboexotica 2008 post by Eddie Codel on Laughing Squid
Announcement of the Annual Cocktail Robot Award winners on SuicideBots

* * *

All photos featured above have been taken by Eddie Codel, Bre Pettis, CTP, and SHIFZ, and are released under Creative Commos License AT-NC-SA.

So here we go with a couple of spots that may fulfill your needs for vegan yumminess:

The Go Veg Diner, a place selling all vegan, healthy (they say) fast food – which totally reminds me of Yellow Sunshine in Berlin -, just opened its gates in 10th district, Favoritenstr. 156 (11am – 09pm, closed on Sundays).
Unfortunately, I haven’t made it there yet, but I believe it’s somewhat in the middle between Formosa, Rupps and Schillinger – and worth a visit for sure!

Now that we can finally have some summer feelings (can we? pleease? for more than three days in a row?), there IS a tremendous need for ice cream.
The Eissalon am Schwedenplatz, just a few steps ahead from U Schwedenplatz, has started a cooperation with VGT and now serves three different cups of vegan ice cream varieties, changing weekly.
Still, I’m possibly the biggest fan ever of Zanoni & Zanoni, Lugeck 7, who offer three kinds of delicious vegan ice cream (which they call lactose- and sugarfree, but in fact have been proven to be vegan by Charly Schillinger): jogurt – raspberry, vanilla jogurt – blueberry, and chocolate, if I recall right.

Also, WerkzeugH in 5th district, Schoenbrunnerstr. 61, is my new favorite place to hang out in the sun and have a delicious dirty soy chai latte – both way cheaper and way more luscious than Starbucks or the Coffeeshop Company, since they offer David Rio’s Chai selection there (unfortunately, the mouth-watering “Elephant Vanilla Chai” is not 100% vegan, but the still amazing “Tiger Spice Chai” is) -, and we therefore even moved our Sunday’s Team Dirty Chai over there! =)
Every Sunday, WerkzeugH offers a large breakfast buffet on a pay-as-you-wish basis, too (sort of like at Der Wiener Deewan – if you haven’t been there yet, go make sure to check out that place as well!); unfortunately, this is mostly non-vegan, but Manfred assured me they’re working on it.

And, last but not least: Mike showed me the most unbelievable and awesome thing ever: a pack of American Oreos he had just bought at the Coffeeshop Company at Thalia, Mariahilferstr. 99! I know they’ve been selling the european (as in: non-vegan…) Oreo cookies ever since, so seeing CC switching over to the vegan originals seems like heaven to me! Woohooo!

Right this minute at Kunsthalle Project Space, the ‘Games. Their Present-Day Role in Art & Politics’ exhibition is being opened – which looks awesome to me!

Here’s what the Kunsthalle site says about it:

The series of events and the exhibition scheduled to accompany the European Soccer Championship 2008 in the Kunsthalle project space centers on the politics and present-day role of games. Societies present themselves through their games, whose syntax, semantics, and performative practice both distort the prevailing circumstances and articulate the desires and ideals inherent in them.

Games have always been part of popular culture. Today, interactive PC games, online games, and Internet role-playing games form the hottest-selling branch of the globalized entertainment and culture industry. Its turnover exceeds that of the motion picture industry: the US producer of the role-playing game World of Warcraft, for example, registered 300,000 new players only last year, and tens of thousands of players move through the virtual worlds of Linden Labs’ Second Life every day.

Because of their enormous social and economic significance, games are the – hitherto underestimated – aesthetic and sociopolitical fighting zone of the future: in the forms of their motifs and their architecture, in their narrative structures and their use.

The series of events and the exhibition will explore the concept of games in its manifold relationships with today’s culture, technology, and politics and focus on interactive games as a medium of contemporary art.

Curators: Mathias Fuchs, Ernst Strouhal

So go have a quick look – and stop by at Karlsplatz nao.

Btw, the exhibit will be on display until July 06th, 2008, so there’s absolutely no excuse to miss it ;)

It’s always been one of my – if not the – favorite fashion design event in Vienna, and again, a lot of my very most beloved labels will be there on display.

Opening hours:
Friday 17th, 12:00md – 10:00pm
Saturday 18th, 11:00am – 10:00pm
Sunday 19th, 11:00am – 07:00pm

Tickets are 5,- (3,-)/d or 7,-/3d
For fashion shows, parties and all the rest of the program look here.

Go there, have fun, and don’t bring your credit card! ;)

Well, or rather just this one:

Tupalo is a super awesome web2.0-social-mapping-startup-thingy that basically makes you find even more awesome stuff in your neighbourhood. Being for locals and visitors alike, it provides with almost anything one could possibly be looking for, ranging from a vegan Beisl to the top-hip venues over to the very best record shop ever.
Take a look at what DaddyD has to say about Tupalo over here!

Congrats to Mike & Clemens at this point, I’m very much looking forward to your launch party tomorrow!

(Btw, some totally unofficial inside scoop: There *may* be give-aways… so come early! ;)

Though most of you may have already heard of a chai latte, a spiced tea concentrate infused with hot milk, or even a soy chai latte, using soy milk instead of the dairy version; or already tried it at one of the countless coffee shops that spread all over town within the last years, not so many (not to say hardly anyone) will have any idea what exactly the term ‘dirty’ could stand for in that connection.

Well, kindest readership!
I have the honor to introduce to you what was brought to my ears – and lips – all the way from Los Angeles, CA (by Sean Bonner, to be accurate) last winter, and what changed my life by the means of my weekly habits and social interactions in the most joyful and enriching way possible – for a beverage, that is.

The dirty (soy) chai consists of the classic chai syrup (as to be found at your well-assorted coffee shop of trust), infused with hot (soy) milk (rumor has it, the soy makes it even more ‘muddy’; to me, it simply makes it more delicious: vegan, that is) and added with two shots of espresso – which makes it ‘dirty’.
And besides, being an addict, I should not forget to mention the excess of caffeine the dirtyness brings along with its super-awesome taste!

Now back to all the gibberish about the movement thingy:

The Team Dirty Chai, also known as TDC, was founded back in calender week 07 in the year 2008 by Dave aka DaddyD (whom you will certainly know by the trail of his posts) and my most humble self, when twittering about running out of coffee in the still of the night. Although Dave – as so far everyone we’ve met – was rather bemused about the general idea of pouring coffee in one’s tea, after trying a dirty chai latte was proselytized immediately and finds himself now co-leading Team Dirty Chai, evangelizing our friends (from thereon to be called the TDC army) towards a better taste in caffeinated, muddy-liquid treats.

We do so every Sunday, meeting at around 10.30 am CET at the Starbucks Mariahilfer Strasse/Theobaldgasse, aiming to improve our social skillz (yes, we do have some) by getting down to the *socially* dirty.

Our core team members include the following – as lovely as famous as down-to-the-dirty – folks: Kewagi, Angelol, Oneup, and Enkido, all of them admittedly geeks and/or nerds and/or ‘artists’ in some or the other way; but since the dirty chai meme spread rapidly amongst the Viennese Twitter league, the TDC army is still unstoppably growing, aiming to become the most notably alliance of 2008 a.d.

So there you have it.
Now screw up your courage, take heart, and join the TDC movement for more deliciousness and sociality in life!

Team Dirty Chai is legion.
And soon it’ll be on Wikipedia, fo sho ;)

Photograph no. 1 taken by Angelo Laub (licensed under CC by-nc-sa)