In the cyberdelic daze of the early 1990s, Mondo 2000 was the publication-of-record for the emerging digital counterculture. Founded by our dear pal RU Sirius, it was not just a magazine (with an expiration date), but a “strange attractor” for freaks interested in the new edge of computers, pranks, digital art, fringe culture, hacktivism, psychedelics, consciousness, weird science, and hacking. In fact, RU and the Mondo scene were the magnets that drew me to San Francisco in 1992.
In today’s surreality, RU’s madcap memetics and laugh-out-loud cybercriticism is needed more than ever. And so, he invites us to celebrate the insanity at the “Gulf of Delirium, A Gathering of the Cyberculture Tribes” in San Francisco, June 7, at the Gray Area theater. Below are the details. Turn on, tune in, and freak out.
The event celebrates the live debut of the band R.U. Sirius & Phriendz and the soft release of the band’s album The Smarter Kings of Deliria alongside talks and presentations by some of the community’s keenest minds. It celebrates the vitality of the alternative cultural universe in the wild new millennium and stirs opposition to today’s discombobulated state of the nation and the world.
Sirius is best known as the founding editor of the visionary Mondo 2000 magazine, which “was at the leading edge of a new culture emerging around digital technology,” in the 1990s, says Wired magazine, which followed in Mondo‘s wake. He is the author of 14 books, including one co-written with psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary. Called “legendary” in the media, Sirius has been featured in a Time magazine cover story, The New York Times and numerous other publications. He has recorded three albums of potently original music: his latest with his futuristic rock project R.U. Sirius & Phriendz, one as Mondo Vanilli recorded for Trent Reznor’s Nothing Records (but as-yet-unreleased), and his late 1970s/early ’80s punk band the Party Dogs.
He and the band will be joined by kindred visionary speakers and presentations from the Bay Area’s left-field bohemian brain trust:
• Bart Nagel: Art director and photographic shaman for Mondo 2000.
• Mark Pauline: Co-founder of the machine-driven performance art collective Survival Research Laboratories.
• Bean (Tina Blaine): Former leader and co-founder of the internationally-acclaimed cybertribal electronic percussion ensemble D’Cuckoo.
• Lee Felsenstein: Seminal personal computer inventor and original hacker.
• Naut Humon: Composer, curator, performer and founder/artistic director of Recombinant Media Labs, which produces and presents artworks and performances based on spatial media synthesis and its enveloping virtual, alternative and mixed reality offspring.
• Rudy Rucker: Mathematician, computer scientist, sci-fi author and a founder of the cyberpunk literary movement.
• Linda Jacobson: Extended reality pioneer and co-founder of Wired magazine.
• John Law: artist, culture-jammer, neon sign technician and primary member of the Cacophony Society and co-founder of Burning Man.
• V. Vale: Editor, writer/author, musician and founder of RE/Search Publications,whose “against-the-status-quo” works stimulate the imagination and optimistic skepticism.
• Cindy Cohn: Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• John Sanborn: Pioneering media and video artist who has embedded his futuristic work into corporate and digital entertainment culture and the aesthetic cutting edge.
• Cintra Wilson: Writer, performer and cultural critic known as “the Dorothy Parker of the cyber age.”
The event follows through from Ken Kesey’s famed 1960s “Acid Tests” that fostered San Francisco’s freak counterculture with a 21st Century upgrade. The evening promises inspiration, provocation, brain food for thought, resistance and rebellion, and most of all reveling and fun galore for freely-freaking outsiders and futurists. Its goal is MADA, MARA and MATA approved: Make America Dance, Rock and Think Again.
The suggested donation at the door from $5 to $40; proceeds will benefit Gray Area, which recently lost critical funding due to MAGA and Musky DOGE depredations. Doors open at 7 PM. Special advance CD copies of The Kings of Deliria as well as books and other merchandise will be on sale at the event.
Previously:
• Cyberculture pioneer RU Sirius’s new album of ‘rhymes against reality
• New music from cyberpunk pioneer RU Sirius and The Dwarves’ Blag Dahlia
• Interview with Mondo 2000’s RU Sirius on the internet’s techno-utopian past and clusterf*cked present
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