mode for a certain politics of philosophical ideas. This was the Cambrian Explosion of monochrom. We wanted to experiment, try stuff, find new forms of telling our stories. But, to be clear, it was (and still is) not about keeping the pace, of staying up-to-date, or (even worse) staying "fresh". The emergence of new media (and therefore artistic) formats is certainly interesting. But etching information into copper plates is just as exciting. We think that the perpetual return of 'the new', to cite Walter Benjamin, is nothing to write home about - except perhaps for the slave-drivers in the fashion industry. We've never been interested in the new just in itself, but in the accidental occurrence. In the moment where things don't tally, where productive confusion arises. All the other core team members joined between 1995 and 2006. Grenzfurthner is the group's artistic director. He defines Monochrom's artistic and activist approach as 'Context hacking' or 'Urban Hacking'. The group monochrom refers to its working method as "Context Hacking," thus referencing the hacker culture, which propagates a creative and emancipatory approach to the technologies of the digital age, and in this way turns against the continuation into the digital age of centuries-old technological enslavement perpetrated through knowledge and hierarchies of experts. ... Context hacking transfers the hackers' objectives and methods to the network of social relationships in which artistic production occurs, and upon which it is dependent. ... One of context hackers' central ambitions is to bring the factions of counterculture, which have veered off along widely diverging trajectories, back together again. Community and network From its very foundation, the group defined itself as a movement, culture (referring to Iain M. Banks's sci-fi series) and "open field of experimentation". Monochrom supported and supports various artists, activists, researchers and communities with an online publishing platform, a print publishing service (edition mono), and organizes in-person meetings, screenings, radio shows, debate circles, conferences, online platforms. It is fundamental for the group's core members to combine artistic and educational endeavors with community work (cf. social practice). Some collaborations have been rather short-lived (for example the publication of a 1993 fringe science paper by Jakob Segal, projects with the Billboard Liberation Front and Ubermorgen or the administration of Dorkbot Vienna), some have been going for many years and decades (for example with Michael Marrak, Cory Doctorow, Jon Lebkowsky, Fritz Ostermayer, V. Vale, eSeL, Scott Beale/Laughing Squid,