monochrom: art, DIY enthusiasts and extravagant theoreticians
Q21 Backstage: monochrom was founded by Johannes Grenzfurthner and Franz Ablinger in 1993. Other members are Evelyn Fürlinger, Harald List, Anika Kronberger, Frank Apunkt Schneider, Daniel Fabry, Günther Friesinger and Roland Gratzer.
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group of DIY enthusiasts and extravagant theoreticians. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science and political activism. monochrom publishes the book of the same name in addition to its activity in other areas. monochrom is an open field of experimentation.
Interview with Johannes Grenzfurthner
Who/What are you?
My wikipedia entry says that I am an ‘Austrian artist, filmmaker, writer, curator, performer, actor and lecturer’. But I’m too lazy to change it.
What are your fields of activity?
I’ve never confined myself to a specific field of action. With monochrom, I do everything – ranging from musicals to computer games, from documentary films to sex machines.
How do you reach your goals?
With the strategy of not giving up. But that’s not always made easy for a creative person - for instance, by the conditions of late capitalism or food allergies.
What challenges do you face?
a) realising artistic ideas in the form and quality in which I conceive them. Beautiful failure remains an inherent part of the process.
b) drinking at least 2.5 litres of water a day. I’ve got an app now reminding me of that.
What is important to you?
I have never been interested in ‚l'art pour l'art‘. I find it important to find the right medium for the right message. To that effect, I consider myself a story-teller and an educator of the people. How can you explain something to people if they don’t want to listen anymore? There’s tricks, and I’ve been working on them for 26 years.
How big is your team?
We’re nine people. But I’ve never had their blood tested to find out how many of them are human and how many are aliens.
Since when have you been at Q21?
Since 2002, when it all started. So we moved to MQ four years before YouTube even existed.
A perfect work day starts with…
…a battle cry: ‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!’ (‘The people united will never be defeated’)
Events in November
Roboexotica
Date: Thu, Nov 28 to Sun, Dec 1
Venue: Praterzelt, near Liliputbahn in Vienna's Prater
Tickets & Info: www.roboexotica.org
Cheers! Until what seems almost recently, no attempts had been made to publicly 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.
Artists-in-Residence
November: Chase Masterson (USA)
Chase Masterson is a Los Angeles-based singer and actress, best known for her work "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and her work for the Sci-Fi Channel. In 2013, Chase founded Pop Culture Hero Coalition, the first non-profit organization to use stories from TV, comics, and film to teach mental health skills as a way of ending bullying, racism, misogyny, LGBTQI-bullying, cyberbullying, and other forms of injustice.
