Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurther

First of all, I have to admit that I’m not a core member of Monochrom - but since our initial encounter a couple of years ago I really wanted to take precisely this picture for the family album. You might ask yourself, why? Maybe the answer is worth a short blog entry.

In spring 2005 I was working on a performance lecture on Charlie Manson as a cultural icon - remember calling the whole thing an “iconological approach to music sociology” - for the Serious Pop Symposium *), covering the topics of aesthetical appropriation and the analysis of fascistic structures in West-Eastern Pop Culture, when Johannes asked me to do a cameo in “THE FLOWER CURRENCY. A Hippyesque Post-Hippie Approach To Changing the World”.

Almost every book on American counterculture in the 60ties I’ve digged up in Austrian libraries represents the corner of Haigh and Ashbury as the so-to-speak epitomized symbol of “countercultural crossroads”, so still having these thoughts concerning our first encounter in mind I took my chances yesterday and finally did the shot with my cheesy mobile.

*) by Andreas Leo Findeisen (Transforming Freedom), Alexander Nikolic (SLUM TV) and Thomas Jelinek (Labfactory).

Hi guys! Welcome to San Francisco. This Saturday weather is about as good as it gets. Please write something about SF from your alien point of view!

…………..

What’s constituted so, only a pen can penetrate.
I got one here, let’s go!

When I was a little boy, my mother told me one day with tears in her eyes that the strongest man in the world, our national hero Arnold Schwarzenegger had to flee the country from the Russian tanks and went to America to become rich and successful. Left alone without a proper role model, we youngsters got brainwashed by Austria’s totalitarian Soviet puppet regime of Social Democrats, but blessedly - according to Professor Timothy Leary - the CIA provided us with information and sex and drugs and tekkno music, so we were able to liberate ourselves and to pave our way to the electronic frontier.

Despite repeated warnings of Dr. Richard Barbrook - “just like inventing cybernetics without Wiener, inventing Marxism without Marx had now become an ideological priority” - we choose to fully appropriate the Califonian Ideology, which means, according to Victor Pelevin, “establishing a non-contradictory unity of liberal values and revolutionary romanticism within the bounds of a sexually aroused conciousness.” In short terms, we are here not only to make critical art but also to learn from first-hand experience how to become sexy, rich and successful, too - just like our lost father.

Here in San Francisco we stay at a mixed flat share (both cyberpunks and post-cyberpunks) and, not surprisingly, we meet the same weird folks like everywere else in the world, e. g. V. Vale at Blixa Bargeld’s performance at the recombinant media labs yesterday. Later on the day we will join the Lovefest and see the afterparty’s bodypainting show done by our roommates, but first of all we have to get some breakfast and a few things done.

The hospitality of you local people is really amazing, everyone we’ve met within the last three days is so open-minded and helpful and last but not least, California girls are most beautiful groupies in the world - God bless America!

Hi all, Johannes Grenzfurthner and me arrived here in San Francisco two days ago - we’re Metrobloggers from Vienna/Austria and we are currently preparing Arse Elektronika 2007: pr0nnovation?, a pornography and technology conference at kink.com’s porn palace. Unforunatly we are not able to monitor our own media coverage, because right now we are surfing from a Kinko’s copy shop and they block half of the reviews, e.g. the article on Adult Video News.
At least we are glad being able to read the Laughing Squid blog entry.

Blog to you soon.

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From left to right: Johannes Grenzfurthner, Stefan Lutschinger, David Fine.