Comparative Media Studies Joins the ROFLCon Train

Some really great news coming out today that our old friends and allies at MIT’s amazing Comparative Media Studies department are joining on up with us to produce ROFLCon II! CMS grad students have done the force proud in the past with the ROFLs: moderating panels, covering the event, working behind the scenes, and DJing in a pinch. They’re an incredible bunch (if you haven’t yet — definitely worth checking out their projects), and we couldn’t be happier to have them on board as we sally forth again.

In other news, we finally got around to dropping out another wave of invites over the weekend and we’re starting to hear back positively on a number of them. Hold onto your hats, should be one helluva interesting week of announcements.

Johannes Grenzfurthner Attending ROFLCon II

With all the ridiculous awesomeness that has been floating out around the webs from last weekend’s Arse Elektronika 2009 festival in San Francisco, I figure it’s an appropriate time to introduce the most recent featured guest at ROFLCon II.

To be explicit, we’re extraordinarily happy today to announce that Johannes Grenzfurthner, founder of monochrom, will be attending ROFLCon II! For those who don’t know already, I could talk at length about the sheer badassery this gent produces: from their slickly sold wares to the creation of crypto-fictional finicky, irascible art geniuses, but I’ll pretty much let him speak for himself in his bio:

Johannes Grenzfurthner’s worldly existence could be summarized as artist, writer, director, researcher and troublemaker. He founded monochrom (an internationally acting art-tech-theory group) — and as part of monochrom he is responsible for Soviet Unterzoegersdorf and other tour-de-farce intertube occurrences. He is head of Arse Elektronika (sex and tech) festival in San Francisco and co-hosts Roboexotica (the only and therefore leading festival for Cocktail-Robotics). He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences, Graz, Austria. Tag cloud: crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania, despair, powernapping.

Johannes actually sent me a photo of him being exploded in two by a landmine from Monochrom’s homebrew adventure game Soviet Unterzoegersdorf 2 — but I think this recent one above from Laughing Squid will more than suffice.

( photo courtesy Scott Beale, CC BY-SA-NC )