Finding Your Weapons of Mass Distribution

A Conversation with Context Hacker Johannes Grenzfurthner

Bonni Rambatan
Narrative Design Podcast
3 min readSep 19, 2015

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Artists of all kinds want to be subversive. But is that enough? How does one really get their disruptive message across?

Join Bonni Rambatan as he hosts a conversation with artist Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom on creating subversive artworks in a time where everyone already expects you to be subversive. Check out the comics below for a short summary.

In this episode, we discuss quite a few of Gilles Deleuze’s ideas, especially on Societies of Control. We also talk briefly about Viennese Actionism and The Yes Men, as well as the traps they occasionally fall into in today’s condition of the art world.

We then discuss at length some of monochrom’s projects, such as the fictitious artist Georg Paul Thomann (bio and everything else can be found here), and the Taiwan incident (result pictured left), illustrating how they try to get around this situation.

We also talk about monochrom’s hedonistic technology festivals trio, Arse Elektronika, Roboexotica, and Hedonistika, as well as their more spontaneous projects, such as the one at 2012's Game Developers Conference (video below).

Finally, we talk a bit of Johaness’s recent film, Die Gstettensaga: The Rise of Echsenfriedl (which you can download here), and his upcoming documentary, TRACEROUTE (which Bonni is helping with some illustrations!).

The episode also features “eBay the Force” music by monochrom and Hans Nieswandt, a part of monochrom’s Udo77 musical. Original music scores were created by our editor and audio engineer CJ Camelia Jonathan.

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Bonni Rambatan
Narrative Design Podcast

Writings on pop culture, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and more. Co-author of “Event Horizon: Sexuality, Politics, Online Culture, and the Limits of Capitalism”.