Rachel Lovinger will give a talk at metalab about a “Personal Journey Towards Datameaningfulness”.

Everything you could possibly want is out there, and soon it will all be digitized. The problem isn’t whether it exists, it’s how you find it. This is the challenge that has plagued the speaker and motivated her to pursue an ambiguous occupation called “Content Strategy.” Her idealized vision of the future of the Internet is the Semantic Web, with its promise of smarter sites that actually understand what content means. In an attempt to answer the question “How did you become interested in datameaningfulness?” Rachel will take a very personal look at the formation of that dream, exposing the cultural, environmental, and historic factors that put her on this path.

Rachel Lovinger works at Avenue A | Razorfish as a Senior Content Strategist, developing ways for global clients to help connect users to the quality content they want and need. She’s particularly interested in relevance, findability, signification, and inherently funny words.

- When: Thursday, September 18 2008, 7:30 PM
- Where: Metalab, Rathausstrasse 6, 1010 Vienna

http://www.metalab.at
http://www.paraflows.at

Here is an old Hartlauer catalogue from 1984…

…and here is the entire brochure as PDF… please check it out…

OLPC Austria is a grassroots coalition of people in the German speaking countries, mainly Austria, interested in contributing to the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project which is more widely known as the “$100 laptop”.

On Saturday OLPC Austria will celebrate a party! Join and get involved!

Metalab, Rathausstraße 6, December 15; 8 PM.
Link

Thomas Brandstetter (who is teaching at the University of Vienna, Dept. of Philosophy) is giving a talk on Friday (Dec 7; 7:30 PM) at the Metalab.
The talk is dealing with the scientific ancestors of computer simulations, so-called “model experiments” in the 19th century.

Link (Metalab; German)
Link (FM4; German)

Tomorrow is Dorkbot Day! Dorkbot Vienna #4 (Nov 28, 2007; 8 PM) features Bre Pettis who will build a Brain Machine.

I already blogged about this workshop some days ago, but I really have to remind you. This will be an awesome presentation. And we’ll fuck your minds. What else could you long for?

(Pic by Cory Doctorow)

Dorkbot Vienna #4 (Nov 28, 2007; 8 PM @ Metalab Vienna) features Bre Pettis who will build a Brain Machine.

This is a project that Mitch Altman put together and it’s a brain wave machine that flashes LEDs and binaural audio to brute force your brain to achieve different brain wave states. Pretty much everyone halucinates in some way. A meditation sequence is programmed in, but the whole program is open source, so you can make it do whatever you like. It’s built on Lady Ada’s MiniPOV3 and I’ll have one for you to try out and I’ll have the parts for one to give away so that someone can build it to have on hand at metalab. If someone’s got an EEG, it might be fun to bring it along and see it’s effectiveness. Don’t try this out if you have epilepsy.

Bre hasn’t ordered too many kits! So if you desperately want to join, please put your name on the wiki page immediately!

Link

WTF?
Well, yes… there is a standard called the “Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water” or “VSMOW”. It is an isotopic water standard defined in 1968 by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Despite the somewhat misleading phrase “ocean water”, VSMOW refers to pure water (H2O) and does not include any salt or other substances in seawater. VSMOW serves as a reference standard for comparing hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios, mostly in water samples. Very pure, distilled VSMOW water is also used for making high accuracy measurement of water’s physical properties and for defining laboratory standards since it is considered to be representative of “average ocean water.”

Link 1
Link 2

Martin Pichlmair’s lecture about hacking game machines (Dorkbot #3 @ Metalab) is online now.

Click To Play

Link

A talk by Douglas Irving Repetto (Columbia University, New York), founder of dorkbot, and Jan De Pauw (IDeA, department Rits, Erasmushogeschool Brussel).

Highly recommended!

Friday, July 13, 6-8 PM @ Freiraum, MQ.

Link

There is a new Dorkbot Vienna meeting… and the special guest star is Martin Pichlmair.

Games are a defining medium of our time. The majority of them is produced by multinational corporations, designed to appeal to the mass audience, locked on drm-protected and region-coded data media, and sold, shrink-wrapped in plastic. yet resourceful hackers and artists are working on the liberation of this medium. serious games, homebrew games, and game art are results of their great efforts. martin pichlmair and his guests will present a number of game machine hacks - from a modified pinball machine dating back to the 70s to musical instruments running on the nintendo ds.

Let’s crack open the game machine a bit further.

Lecture/workshop in English language.

Saturday, June 23, 2007, 8:30 PM
Duration: ~90 minutes
@ Metalab, Rathausstrasse 6, 1010 Vienna