Earthmoving @ TEDxVienna 2012

Comrades! Comradettes!
Johannes Grenzfurthner presented Sierra Zulu at TEDxVienna 2011.
He will return for TEDxVienna 2012 to give an update and screen Earthmoving — Sierra Zulu’s short film prequel (featuring Jeff Ricketts, Martin Auer).

TEDxVienna 2012 @ Odeon, Taborstraße 10, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
November 3, 2012.

Sierra Zulu @ Crowdfunding in Austria – Panel discussion

Oh yes, Johannes Grenzfurthner will talk about Sierra Zulu and the Kickstarter campaign at Think out Loud! 2 / Crowdfunding in Linz.

Crowdfunding in Österreich – Paneldiskussion: Erfolgreiche CrowdfunderInnen und BertreiberInnen von Crowdfunding-Plattformen sprechen über die Möglichkeiten und Erfahrungen in/aus Österreich mit Hilfe der Community ein Projekt zu finanzieren. Moderator: Christian Henner-Fehr (Kulturmanager, Co-Founder der stART-Konferenz)Panel-TeilnehmerInnen:
Johannes Grenzfurthner (Sierra Zulu), Lena Robinson (Three Coins), Robi Faustmann, Lisa Keiner (Keiner mag Faustmann), Reinhard Willfort (1000×1000)

November 15, 2012; 4:15 PM at Klub Kantine/Tabakfabrik Linz, Linz Austria.

Link

Sierra Zulu: Johannes Grenzfurthner at Duncan/Channon in SFO

Director Johannes Grenzfurthner is guest star at Duncan/Channon’s Toast of the Tip!

He’s an artist, writer, curator, director, professor, all-around instigator, and founder of Monochrom, the notorious Viennese art/technology/philosophy powerhouse. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Slashdot, Boing Boing, LA Times, NPR, Gizmodo, Wired. He (or his lookalike Comrade Chrusov) have been spotted at SXSW, TEDxVienna, Maker Faire, Google’s Tech Talks, Ars Electronica, Mozilla Drumbeat Barcelona and underground hacker conferences around the world. From translating dense political philosophy into internet memes to composing pop musicals about banking software to running the first (and, inevitably, leading) festival concerned with cocktail robotics, Johannes and Monochrom constantly seek the right medium for their message(s). Among other projects, they’ve established a one-baud semaphore line through the streets of San Francisco, buried couples alive in plush surveillant coffins and cracked the hierarchies of the art market with a series of elaborate pranks. Now they are taking on the silver screen with the Kickstarter-funded story of Sierra Zulu, the last Soviet micro-state.

As our first Toast of the Tip honoree of the fall, Grenzfurthner will share his global adventures in subverting subversion and discuss some of the oddities of storytelling and filmmaking in a digital age.

Wednesday, 26 September 2012

Beer, wine, snacks, 5:30 pm

Speaker, 6:00 pm

RSVP REQUIRED

There will be a list. To be included, RSVP by the morning of 26th to: moc.nonnahcnacnudnull@pvsr

Sierra Zulu presents: Schorsch Kamerun and Robert Stachel

We hereby use the “internet” (“international network”) to inform you about developments on Sierra Zulu‘s casting front! Should the Western development funds ever be transferred to our account, we will be able to welcome two loved and much-admired actors to our team!

Standing ovations for Schorsch Kamerun and Robert Stachel!

Schorsch Kamerun?

Schorsch Kamerun (born 1963) is a German musician, singer, author, theatre director, and club proprietor.
He is best known as the founding member and lead singer of Die Goldenen Zitronen, a political punk band from Hamburg. In recent years, he has also worked as an author and director for the theater and has staged several of his plays at renowned theatres around Germany, Austria and Switzerland, such as the Volksbuehne in Berlin.
Kamerun is also co-founder, with Rocko Schamoni and others, of the Golden Pudel nightclub in Hamburg, which is well known as a center of the Hamburger Schule movement in German alternative rock.
He also released some solo albums (1996: Warum Ändern Schlief, 1997: Now: Sex Image, 2000: Monsters Rule The World!), radio dramas and recorded songs for a few compilation albums.

Robert Stachel?

Robert Stachel (born 1972) is a comedian and TV producer living in Vienna, mostly identified as a member of the comedy group maschek that he co-founded in 1998.
maschek have been an integral part of the comedy programmes of Austrian public television for several years. In their performances, maschek take on politicians, celebrities, television personalities, and the like, lampooning controversial aspects and sore spots of Austrian politics and society. Performing in maschek, Stachel is known for his ability to switch between characters, inflections, and accents in a split second without losing his timing.
Stachel studied Journalism and Political Science at the University of Vienna and the FU Berlin. From 1994 to 2006, he worked as a freelancer, mostly dealing with research, development and project organization in the intersection of media, society and software. He was also involved in a number of alternative media projects, starting in the 1990s with college TV and radio.  Later he co-developed the Vienna Community TV station “Okto”.

Sierra Zulu: What’s up, philosophy!?

Why is the digital revolution such an important theme in your film? (But please, no spoilers!)

Movies are exciting. People go to the cinema in order to experience new worlds. But cinema is about to lose its prime source of narrative, having been tethered thus far to physical action that can be easily filmed. Cinema needs tempo, it needs speed. The “movement-image” (oh Gilles Deleuze!) depends on tangible, concrete physical action onto which the cameras can point. Yet in contrast, the real world of non-cinema is losing physical action day by day. It is a time of the abstract, optically intangible processes of networks and data systems. This regress of visual displayability is rather daft. Cinema has thrived on the visable for more than a hundred years. It’s easy to create a feature film about a bank robbery, but that’s anachronistic. Some of the most important crimes are invisible, such as electronic money movements between international stock exchanges. Hollywood cinema on the other hand still hasn’t evolved beyond anything better than banal sequences straight out of an Errol Flynn movie. How can we portray the stories and fairy tales of our (new) world? All those dramas and comedies? All those stories and atrocities? Well, we want to try it. We want to distill our view into a 90 minute narration of a dark, humorous story about the problems of the 21st century.

So it’s a funny film about serious topics?

Indeed. It’s something for everyone. Friends of a good old LOL as well as people who like to delve into the many layers of cultural criticism and nerdish references. We aim to use stylistic elements of the black comedy and the farce to deal with the fundamental questions of the digital frontier while also tackling problems of national supremacy, international conflict solving strategies, national and international legislation, the power of the media, and the diplomatic impotency of international organizations. Sierra Zulu wants to explore the perspectives of people who live on the fringes of what we would call “history” or “the world”. This fringe area – surrounded by the European Union – is where we find the microstate Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, the almost forgotten ‘last autonomous republic of the Soviet Union’ which has fallen victim to its geo-political, historical, cultural, and economical irrelevance. This village of 1,500 people is the last paragon of ideals which have been eradicated from the face of the earth with Soviet-Communism. Sierra Zulu is about implanting false memories into the political and cultural record of our modern world, simulating the effects of this partial and local rewriting of history through the initiation of an entire network of events caused by this transposition. Or to put it differently: how would our current reality react to a Soviet Unterzoegersdorf? And what does a “Soviet Hicksville” have to contribute to the betterment of humankind? In a time of global discussions about topics like internet censorship, leaked cables and robot killer drones, the world needs to hear the answers offered by a couple of Soviets in the middle of nowhere. Really, we mean it.

Sierra Zulu at Journey Vienna 2012

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf’s Armed Force(s) will take part in the massive street game Journey to the End of the Night. And they will make your life (secular) hell!
It is time that the Western players face a real challenge!

The city spreads out before you. Rushing from point to point, lit by the slow strobe of fluorescent buses in dark streets. Stumbling into situations for a stranger’s signature. Fleeing unknown pursuers, breathing hard, admiring the landscape and the multitude of worlds hidden in it.

For one night, drop your relations, your work and leisure activities, and all your usual motives for movement and action, and let yourself be drawn by the attractions of the chase and the encounters you find there.

Be prepared for a game of epic proportions!

Mark the date! Saturday, September 8, 2012 — in Vienna!

Journey to the End of the Night / Page
Journey to the End of the Night / FB event

Sierra Zulu: Obtain The T-Shirt!

Interested individual! As you might remember, we created a limited set of t-shirts for our Kickstarter campaign. But the masses were in uproar!
They were shouting, tweeting and faxing:

“We want textiles too!”
“To hell with limitations!”
“Make them available for everyone!”

“Lower quality! Higher affordability!”

It is our job to (randomly) obey the dicatorship of the (unfree) market and are happy being able to announce: “Get our fresh new Sierra Zulu t-shirt!”
It is daring, yet pleasing! Nothing fancy, but still full of distinction!

Austria: EUR 18 (plus EUR 4 shipping & handling)
Europe: EUR 18 (plus EUR 8 shipping & handling)
USA, Venezuela, New Caledonia and whatever else there is: EUR 18 (plus EUR 12 shipping & handling)

Order via sierra-zulu AT monochrom.at (and pay via Paypal).

Sierra Zulu’s Prop Master: Hans Wagner

Prop Masters control all aspects of property departments. They oversee, and are responsible for, the procurement or production, inventory, care and maintenance of all props associated with productions, ensuring that they are available on time, and within budgetary requirements. They also ensure that selected props suit the film’s style and overall design, and that they accurately reflect the production’s time period and culture. Property Masters oversee the staff, and the smooth running, of the property department, working to high standards of accuracy and detail. As much of the work involved is administrative, the role is often office based. Property Masters are responsible to production designers, and work as part of the art department.

We will have a ton of props at Sierra Zulu.
And we are glad that Hans Wagner will wrangle with that stuff.

Hans is prop designer, set decorator and art department extraordinaire and can already look back on a long and successful career. He has worked on such diverse film productions as Caché (Michael Haneke), Immer nie am Meer (Antonin Svoboda), Schlafes Bruder (Joseph Vilsmaier) and Der Überfall (Florian Flicker).

Sierra Zulu Kickstarter: Press overview

Here is a (still incomplete) press overview of our Kickstarter campaign. Not too shabby.

Kurier Kult: “Crowdfunding für Unterzögersdorf”

Telepolis: “Monochrom will Science-Fiction-Komödie über Crowdfunding finanzieren”

Futurezone: “Filmdreh: Monochrom setzt auf Kickstarter”

APA OTS: “SIERRA ZULU: Sowjets bitten das Internet um Geld”

Salzburger Nachrichten: “Unsichtbare Verbrechen”

Laughing Squid: “Sierra Zulu, A Feature Length Political Sci-fi Dark Comedy by Monochrom”

Boing Boing: “Mutant political science fiction movie Sierra Zulu seeks kickstarting”

io9: “A Totally Demented Alternate History of a 21st Century Soviet Holdout”

Nerdcore: “Sierra Zulu: Crowdfunded SciFi-Grotesque from Austria”

Betatext: “Crowdfunding für Unterzögersdorf”

GigaOM: “Soviets, swords, comics and booze”

Libération: “Jeu des sous aux soviets zoulous”

io9: “Crowdfund a film about the last Soviet microstate, a video game about an intern on the moon, and a post-apocalyptic TV series”

Écrans: “Jeu des sous aux soviets zoulous”

Giant Freakin Robot: “Sierra Zulu Sci-Fi/Comedy Kickstarter Cast Includes Robert Picardo And Amber Benson”

Social Film Marketing: “monochrom’s Sierra Zulu erzielt grandiosen Crowdfunding-Erfolg”

The Gap: “Sierra Zulu bei Kickstarter erfolgreich”

Futurezone: “Sierra Zulu: Kickstarter-Film erfolgreich”

Der Standard: “Spielfilm “Sierra Zulu” mit Crowdfunding finanziert”

Update, additional links:

Ö1: “Crowdfunding: Kunstsponsoring im Netz”

film.at: “Sierra Zulu”

The Gap: “Die Crowd auf Knopfdruck aktivieren”