Longtime Boing Boing tv contributors monochrom have brought us Soviet terrorism training videos, improvisational urban fires, and highfalutin economic philosophy from the mouths of sock puppets.

Monochrom sock puppets Kiki & Bubu return to us today, for a very special holiday-themed episode: Kiki & Bubu & The Feelings. The yuletide song they perform for us is sure to be an instant classic -- Killing Capitalism with Christmas. You can grab it from iTunes, on the 2008 album "Monochrom: Carefully Selected Moments".

Bonus: Watch this behind-the-socks footage, from the secret filming location in the Austrian alps.

SYNOPSIS (some spoilers):

Yes, it is a time of crisis, but it is also a time of Christmas. Slovenian hackers crack CNN's hologram thingie, and bring us the avatar of gender-ambiguous singing sensation Enron Hubbard. Enron sings a hypnotic call to reject holiday consumerism and replace malls with meaning. Or if not meaning, post-internet nihilism and the ironic use of MySpace smiley-gifs. Online porn monster shows up after Enron is finished singing his holiday song, then Kiki and Bubu scamper off for eggnog frappucinos.

(Special thanks to chief executive sock puppet overlord and awesome guy Johannes Grenzfurthner!)

Boing Boing tv's "best of" retrospective continues, with a look back at some of the episodes we dig most. One of the things that makes me (and the whole BBtv team) happiest about our daily video project is the opportunity to collaborate in new ways with creative, fun, insane friends of the blog -- like Johnannes G. and the monochrom crew in Vienna. Their wonderful video contributions have become part of the fabric of our show, and no "favorites" review would be complete without their madcap art-tech-philosophy hijinks.

Above, this one's probably the all-time fave of the BBtv staff and crew -- Campfire at Will.

Below, runner-up: the Soviet Underzegenergjakdfjgndorf terrorist training video, shot at *actual* nuclear history sites in the American Southwest, with help from BB pal Sean Bonner.

Monochrom is: Johannes Grenzfurthner, Evelyn Fürlinger, Harald List, Anika Kronberger, Franz Ablinger, Frank Apunkt Schneider, Daniel Fabry, Günther Friesinger, Roland Gratzer, and international ambassador Jacob Appelbaum.

More monochrom archives on Boing Boing tv:
* Bye Bye
* Monochrom: Economic Recession Wisdom from Sock Puppets.
* Monochrom's "Kiki, Bubu, and the Self"
* Nazi Petting Zoo
* Fisch Interview
* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig
* Google and China's "Great Firewall": Fun with the BLF and monochrom
* Terrorist training video from Soviet Unterzögersdorf
* Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf crashes Disney party at ETech
* Dead media and living light

A short film by monochrom about a man who dies, is reborn, and sprouts gills. Created by Harald Homolka List, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Evelyn Fürlinger (link to monochrom site for this film, here are other short films from them in German).

Previous work from monochrom on Boing Boing tv:

* Monochrom: Economic Recession Wisdom from Sock Puppets.
* Monochrom's "Kiki, Bubu, and the Self"
* Nazi Petting Zoo
* Fisch Interview
* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

Today on BBtv, Austrian art collective monochrom return with a new episode of their subversive puppet show: "Kiki and Bubu and the Good Plan." Our socked crusaders explore the connections between Michael Bay, the military-entertainment complex, Web 2.0 business cocktail parties, and the impending collapse of the American economy.

* BBtv: Monochrom's "Kiki, Bubu, and the Self"
* Nazi Petting Zoo
* Fisch Interview
* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

Update: monochrom's own "director's cut" of today's episode is here.

Austrian subversive art collective monochrom present an all-new installment of the philosophical sock puppets Kiki and Bubu on today's episode of Boing Boing tv.

These fuzzy logicians ponder the true nature of individual identity in capitalist societies, and connect the dots between Star Trek fandom, Sesame Street characters, Broadway musicals, and racy jpegs.

Previously:

* Nazi Petting Zoo
* Fisch Interview
* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

Today on Boing Boing tv, "Nazi Petting Zoo," a new piece of political theater by Austrian art prankster collective monochrom, who explain:

In 1938 Austria joined the Third Reich. Millions cheered Hitler and in the referendum 99.75% said 'yes' to 'Greater Germany'.

But after World War II, many Austrians sought comfort in the idea of Austria as "the Nazis' first victim". Factions of Austrian society tried for a long time to advance the view that it was only annexation at the point of a bayonet(te).

But it's time to embrace history. It's time to remember the feel-good days of 1938. It's time to let our real feelings out! It's time to hug the Nazi, Austria! Finally!

Previous Boing Boing tv episodes featuring monochrom:

* Fisch Interview
* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets: monochrom
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

In today's episode, Austrian subversive art collective, monochrom , presents the job interview video of one applicant, "Mr. Fisch." We don't know exactly how the tape was smuggled out past corporate security, but it somehow ended up in the BBtv mail room. We present it to you here to enjoy in all of its awkward and uncomfortable glory.

Previous Boing Boing tv episodes featuring monochrom:

* Orwell's 1984 deconstructed by puppets: monochrom
* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

Sock puppets (real, not metaphorical) deconstruct the symbolism of George Orwell's 1984 in the latest BBtv afterschool special from Austrian subversive art collective monochrom. Kiki and Bubu explore the age-old question of whether sexuality exists on the internet, and the soft-sculpture proletariat struggle continues.

Previously:

* Monochrom's Marxist sock puppets
* Monochrom: MyFaceSpace, the musical
* Monochrom: Campfire at Will
* Monochrom: Falco Stairs
* Monochrom: Bar code artist Scott Blake / Falco stencil memorial
* Human USB Hack / Very Simple Motor
* Mark's Curie Engine / Monochrom's love song for Lessig

The San Francisco-based Billboard Liberation Front has been transforming the world of advertising since 1977. When Austrian art-pranksters and regular BBtv guests monochrom recently visited the United States to spread their Sculpture Mob dogma, a historic meeting with the elusive BLF took place. Boing Boing tv's hidden cameras captured everything.

And in part two of today's BBtv episode, Xeni travels with the BLF and monochrom to document their first-ever joint exploit to build "The Great Firewall of China" around one of the Google signs on the internet giant's Mountain View campus. Hijinks ensued; dogs, cops, and GOOG security guards pursued; TV news crews newsed.

The goal of their "unpaid advertising services"? To draw attention to Google's role in online censorship within China. As it happened, this particular day was the same day of a Google shareholder meeting, during which related proposals came up for vote.

Link to Billboard Liberation Front press release, and here's monochrom's side of the story. Here are previous BBtv episodes with monochrom.

Wrapping up our week-long retrospective of the most crowd-pleezin' episodes in Boing Boing tv's first 6 months of existence, we revisit an episode in which...

Vienna-based art-pranksters monochrom teach us how to "hack the urban context" with campfires, sausages, beer, and an elderly Austrian gentleman who speaks LOL. In the second segment of today's episode, someone constructs a campfire, complete with beer bottles and half-cooked links, right in the middle of the Vienna airport. American kids, don't try this at home unless you want a one-way to Camp X-Ray.

Schnitzel and subversive smores FTW!

Art-prankster Johannes Grenzfurthner of monochrom storms the front doors of various multinational corporations to ask employees (and random folk on the street) if they're aware that these companies have "corporate anthems." Yes, theme songs, sometimes official, sometimes unofficial, always painfully cheesy.

KPMG boasts a particularly heinous ditty, and while renditions sometimes pop up on YouTube, none can be quite so rich as the one we paid an Argentinian street musician $20 to sing. "KPMG, we're strong as can be -- a dream of power and energy!" Bet you $20 the song sticks in your brain longer than you'd like.

Johannes explains, "I told all of the would-be anthem singers that I was interviewing them for an Austrian economics journal called 'Wir kriegen euch' (We will get you, in German)."

Link to previous Boing Boing tv episodes featuring Johannes and the monochrom crew.

Boing Boing tv received a classified video message from the People’s Republic of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf -- a message encoded in an almost-obsolete communist LOLcat cypher.

BBtv's terror analysts have decoded this video for you, dear viewer, and we present it in entirety today. Our encryption advisors from monochrom believe the two men in the movie might be His Excellency the Ambassador of the People’s Republic of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf — Nikita Chrusov — and secretary Nicolai Jossif Malkin.

WARNING: the last few seconds of this terrorist missive contain not-yet-decrypted data that some viewers may find disturbing. Tighten your tinfoil beanies, and lock down your wigs.

Previously on BBtv:
Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf crashes Disney party at ETech

UPDATE: The Soviets respond. Agent moloshnikov from People’s Republic of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf says:

Comrades all over the world!

I still shiver! My heart is filled with universal anger! Something unspeakable happened!

Again, the mainstream online media outlet “Boing Boing TV” reports about the diplomatic visit of His Excellency Ambassador Nikita Chrusov to the “United States”! Just a friendly vacation trip! And they label it as “Terrorist Training!” What an unforgivable insult!

Please to be watching. BBtv's invizibul Soviet bureau telexes report:

Soviet Unterzögersdorf is last existing republic of USSR. The enclave maintains no diplomatic relationship with surrounding so-called "Republic of Austria" or with the Fortress "European Union." The downfall of her motherland -- the Soviet Union -- in the early 1990s had a particularly bad effect on the country’s economic situation. It is a great challenge to secure survival for the small but proud confederation. External reactionary forces put the country in danger.

His Excellency Ambassador of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, Nikita Chrusov, is entering the Marriott Hotel in San Diego, during O'Reilly ETech conference, to attend a corporate afterparty sponsored by Disney.com.

After four weeks of sea travel on a cargo ship and two weeks of journey in a Greyhound bus, the Ambassador is eagerly awaiting a meeting. He wants to confront Disney executives with a couple of questions, especially talking to them about their "sugar-coated bullets", that threaten the very existence of his country by brutal cultural force.

But then -- he is forcibly ejected from party, like cosmonaut from spaceship escape hatch. Commissar Chrusov calls this act "an unbelievable act of political shortsightness" and complains about mysterious green "poisoned pudding."

Special thanks to Johnannes and monochrom, who had absolutely nothing to do with this, and to cameo guests Eddie Codel of Geek Entertainment TV; Scott Beale of Laughing Squid (who covered this incident here); and John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder.

Shot by BBtv segment producer Russ Gooberman.

Update: Soviet Unterzoegersdorf is not amused.

Today on Boing Boing tv, another episode in our ongoing series of experimental animated shorts.

First, regular BBtv contributors monochrom from Austria give us The Void's Foaming Ebb, a hallucinatory retrospective of ancestral media -- from the eight-track to the VCR to long-extinct PDAs -- and a meditation on dead data-forms of the future (created by: Frank Apunkt Schneider, Christoph Sonnleitner, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Stefan Scheder, Roland Gratzer, David Dempsey). German version here.

Next, 198090 by BBtv favorites Peppermelon from Argentina -- a sweet short suggesting new forms of luminous eco-erotica (created by: Fernando Sarmiento & Tomás Garcia).