Week 05/2026

Et je regarde

Nikolaus Forgó

23 Jan 2026 — 4 min read

Emperor Franz Joseph, prominently displayed in one of the meeting rooms in the winterpalais of Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna city center. The rooms are currently used by the federal ministry of finance which is why I had a the privilege to be there due to a project meeting of CLEAR .

NSFW

This week's song comes from Gabi Hartmann. It's a simple, yet melancholic dance.

The music video with its coarse-grained 70-ies in New York gritty Kodak Eastman 5247 Film look fits well.

And, interestingly, there's a second video with different, yet also very nice sound and image estetics.

And an acoustics version.

She's giving concerts in Berlin and Dortmund next week. Here's an interview with her.

Retrospect

#arsboni

Otmar Lendl from CERT.at was in the #arsboni #laundry. I gave an insider's (technical) view on the (very Austrian) way of collaboration in information security, taking into consideration the NIS2 directive and the NIS2 transposition law 2026.

OEAW

I attended the scholarship ceremony with Klaudia receiving her scholarship. President Faßmann and Minister Holzleitner were present.

Faßmann put the ceremony into a geopolitical context and was directly mentioning tensions with the US, the need that Europe focuses on its strengths and on science as one of Europes assets. Interestingly, he apologized at the end for having been political in his speech.

I was very impressed by the fellows' diversity - topicwise, languagewise and personalitywise.

The winners and their projects are presented in a brochure.

Pro Bono

The Podcast Pro Bono - hosted by younger people of the department - goes into a new series and I am very grateful that Hannah, Julia and Lukas have taken over the reins here.

The first new episode is an interview with Alina and Hellena from SHE*talks.

(Different from before, this is audio only for the moment.)

Ethics Committee

I attended (as alternate member) a meeting of UNIVIE's ethics committee. Following the statutes, the committee "prepares expert reports on [...] research projects" and "assesses whether the protection of the rights, safety and welfare of the subjects [...] or compliance with animal protection and welfare law [...] are adequately ensured when implementing the research project".

Here's the mission statement:

Working there is interesting, not only because of the innovative character of many proposals assessed, but also because there is very little hard law governing the work.

Prospect

Smart Regulation

I will spend three days in Graz, assessing the Field of Excellence Smart Regulation at University of Graz. The cluster unites more than 50 researchers of four faculties, including law.

#arsboni

Strategic Litigation

Michaela Krömer, attorney at law, will join me in the #arsboni #laundry for a second talk on strategic climate litigation.

Here's what she had to say in summer 2024.

"Austria First"

Dr. Thomas Höhne, of counsel, will join me in the laundry as well.

We will speak about the new webradio "Austria first", hosted and paid by the political party FPÖ, and, in particular, about Austrian musicians not wishing to be played there.

Die Zeit, Falter (Paywall), News, digitalfernsehen, Kronen Zeitung and others report about the launch.

LLP

We will have another episode of "Recht neugierig" on Wednesday, January 28, at 19.00 with Alexander Grohs from Neustart.

Look and Feel

Learning How to Die in Japanese

Milena Michiko Flašar wrote a very nice book on Japan and some aspects of its philosophy of life and death.

The author lives in Vienna and some occasions to listen to her are approaching. The book was recommended to me and I bought it in Buchhandlung Riedl.

Trump

Instagram (this account, for example) brought me into a rabbithole of people (some of them experts) arguing that Trump suffers from frontotemporal dementia. The concern as such is already another reason for unrest as symptoms include paranoia, disinhibition, loss of sympathy/empathy and perseverative/compulsive behaviors.

Some media have reported and contextualised the diagnosis (that I obviously can not assess), such as Daily Beast,

The Guardian, Marcus on AI, The Guardian again, USA today, CNN, Healthandme. Interestingly, there are also voices (here, here, here, for example) criticising that legacy media and big tech were downplaying the issue and 'censoring' searches. It's also very interesting how differently different LLMs answer the question whether Trump shows dementia symptoms (Gemini, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Grok).

The matter has got more momentum since Trump has presumably written a letter to the Prime Minister of Norway that is just - so crazy that many (including me) struggled whether this can be really authentic.

As The Atlantic puts it: "Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him."

Two quite recent episodes of Falter Radio are a good supplemet to the matter. Prof. Dr. Oliver Nachtwey decribes brillantly the phenomenon of democratic fascism