monocon – Barcamp

monocon is an unconference with open workshops, lectures and presentations that has been taking place since 2018. Its content and schedule are developed by the participants themselves at the beginning of the conference and shaped as it progresses.

monocon is organized by monochrom, an internationally active art-technology-philosophy collective. Founded in 1993, monochrom works with a wide variety of media and art formats and publishes the book and magazine series monochrom.

The art collective monochrom refers to their work method as “context hacking”, referring to the hacker culture that propagates a creative and emancipatory approach to the technologies of the digital age and thus opposes the extension of a centuries-old culture of technological domination and expert hierarchies into the digital age. With its electronic mass media, the democratization or socialization of the means of production seems feasible for the first time (without requiring anything other than a technological revolution).

Context hacking transfers the claims and approaches of hackers to the social and societal conditions in which artistic production takes place and on which it is in turn dependent. In a metaphorical sense, these also have a source code. They run programs that we are confronted with on a user interface. Where we know how and through what a space, a niche, a scene, a subculture, a media or political practice functions, we can change and “recode” it, deconstruct its power relations and emancipate ourselves from its constraints and modes of allocation.