Without a Traceroute

The final presentation on Friday was my favorite one of the entire festival, by far. Even if you haven’t watched any of the videos of the other presentations, I would really suggest watching this one. At least the first half, the audio gets a bit wonky in the second half.

The presenter is Johannes Grenzfurthener (who wears a literal black hat) from the Austrian group Monochrom. He describes the nine members of Monochrom as, “electrotechnicians and designers and linguists and philosophers”. Monochrom started in the late 1980s on the FidoNet BBS, then later published a sort of print fanzine/yearbook about “technology, politics, art crap, whatever we thought would be interesting,” and later expanded into a variety of other formats: robots, short films, t-shirts (“I was a copyright violation in a former life”), musicals (“We really did a musical  about computer programs who check the credit rate of an Austrian criminal”).

They also function as collectors and archivists of “late capitalist” culture. They collect typos: “timeslut,” “what the duck?” “charmobyl,” “censorshop,” “Isreal,” “landlard,” “congratulatinos,” “border feces,” “Untied States,” “pythong,” “the merciful goofness of the Lord,” “In god condition,”. They collect “bad restaurant art”, strange phrases overhead while walking down the street, and “applied office arts” otherwise known as “office doodles”. My favorite was the flowchart/sketch “Files–>Data–>”

Additionally they do real life pranks and games, setting up a “great firewall of China” littered with the “heads” of Chinese dissidents in front of the Googleplex in San Francisco. They held a “Nazi petting zoo” (a petting zoo where people could pet Nazis, not a petting zoo run by Nazis) so that Austrians “can finally embrace history and hug the Nazis.” They organized a session of “massively multiplayer Thumbwrestling,” experimenting with different network topologies for the game.

In San Francisco, they organized an “Arse Electronica” festival (a play on Ars Electronica) devoted to technology in the adult industry and published an anthology “pr0novation: pornography and technological innovation”. This is not as goofy as it sounds: porn has been at the leading edge of innovation in home video recorders, digital photography, and of course, porn was the first “killer app” for the internet (only within the last couple years have social networking sites overtaken porn sites in leading overall web traffic—when someone creates a porn/social networking site [besides myspace], it will probably kill the internet).

The title and main topic of the presentation was “The Innermost Unifier: The Corporate Anthem” and he transitioned to this subject via a pretty amazing sock-puppet show summarizing their view of the way corporate culture has evolved over the years. Then, Grenzfurthener presented a variety of internal corporate loyalty anthems (part of a large archive he is amassing). He sang along enthusiastically, enjoining the audience to accompany him.

The funniest part to me was his presentation of the 1940s IBM anthem, “Ever Onward IBM” complete with lyrics thanking Thomas J Watson for his creation of such a wonderful company to work for. 1940s IBM was presented as the prototype of the old-style, hierarchical corporation. This was pretty hilarious to me, because, of course, it’s Thomas J Watson’s money that’s paying for me to travel around the world hanging out with Austrian art-philosophy-hackers. I was perhaps the only person in the room able to un-ironically join in a hymn praising old man Watson for his glorious vision. But hey, what the hell, “IBM supports Linux 100%” right?

Another of the corporate anthems with personal resonance belonged to the Dutch firm Phillips. Earlier this year, I visited Eindhoven, birthplace of Phillips and visited their first lightbulb factory there. Demonstrating the evolution of corporate songs over the years, the Phillips anthem from the 1980s has no lyrics about serving, or about thanking the wise bosses, but only about feeling good working for the company.

Although Herr Grenzfurthener barely touched on coding, and only obliquely on technology, I think his was in many ways the most hackerish of any of the presentations. He displayed an astonishing breadth of interests and ideas, and Monochrom clearly has an exceptionally firm grasp on the hacker concept of “ha ha only serious”.

The next day, Saturday. Grenzfurthener and his Monochrom compatriot, Günter, led the festival participants in the creation and deployment of a “sculpture mob,” hastily constructed DIY public art. First, we had a training session where groups of three were given five minutes to construct a sculpture from a pile of junk wood using hammers and nails. Then one of the observers was appointed “art critic” and proceeded to critique the creation. My group produced a flimsy rocket ship-like piece that half-collapsed when we attempted to move it. One of the observers, a Frenchman, tapped into a deep well of snooty French art critic stereotypes (think this guy on the LA NPR station) and pronounced our piece a phallic (phallic in the art world being anything that is longer than it is wide) tribute to the fledgling Indian space program.

After the training session, we retrieved from Kiberpipa some pre-assembled wooden roadblock pieces (“The New Kids on the Roadblock,” as the piece was titled) and set out to find an appropriate location to deposit them in Ljubljana. First, we tried to leave them in front of the rather-unimpressive (but surprisingly nudity-friendly) Slovenian Parliament building, but a security guard came out and yelled at us, “Hey, this is the Parliament!” so we feigned ignorance and moved on.

Somebody suggested leaving them in front of the US embassy, but the consensus was that a) nobody goes to the US embassy in Slovenia so no one would see them, and b) we were liable to find ourselves accused of terrorism.

Finally, for maximum attention, it was decided to leave them in the middle of the central square in Ljubljana, Prešerc. We dropped off the payload and then dispersed in true flash mob fashion. People did seem to notice the new wooden objects, and little children especially enjoyed climbing and playing on them. They remained in place for all of Saturday, at least. We dropped them off in the early afternoon, and they were still there when I passed by Prešerc late in the evening. By Sunday around noon, however, they had been removed. Such is the transitory nature of sculpture mobs.

Rather notably, Presen Square (“Prešerc”) is dedicated to France Persen, Slovenia’s greatest poet. There’s a giant statue of him on one side of the square. Any country that erects heroic statues of poets instead of generals is ok in my book.