lecture4hackery

1. Access to computers - and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-On imperative!

2. All information should be free.

3. Mistrust authority - promote decentralization.

4. Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.

5. You can create art and beauty on a computer.

6. Computers can change your life for the better.

(Shawn Levy, Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution)

MIT students in 2002 hacking into a residence computer system to make a smiley face on the side of the building.

The hacker is "someone who turns information--of any kind-- into intellectual property. Hence, programmers can be hackers, but so too can scientists, artists, writers, designers, and so on." (McKenzie Wark)

"Hacking ... is first and foremost a way of looking at things-- be they objects, software, or societal challenges. Secondly, hacking is an attitude towards change... hacking in the everyday means finding imaginative, unexpected solutions to needs or problems in, within or beyond what is available here and now." (Stefania Milan)

Software Cracking + the demoscene

-software cracking is the act of removing the copy protection from a program, that allows the program to be easily pirated online.

-> for many years has been combatted by the software industry, software cracking could be achieved by editing and disassembling code, sharing product keys, converting a demo of a program to the full version etc.

-> In the 1980s, crackers were beginning to hack into computer games, and would put their signature on a hack by adding a introduction scene to the beginning of a game. These short intros were called “cracktros”

-> What developed from this subculture was the demoscene a collective of programmers and artists who created computer programs that created computer graphics that were used in a programmer’s cracktro. These different pieces were then shared and voted on at online parties called demoparties.

Scooptex: Mental Hangover Demo, 1990. Ran on a Commodore Amiga 500.

The Assembly, a giant demoparty/LAN party. Helsinki, 2004.

Super Mario Clouds v2k3 Cory Arcangel, 2002. Image curtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

->Arcangel’s work ‘hacks’ a game cartridge of Super Mario Brothers Nintendo game. Arcangel tweaked the code of the original game, removing all sound and visual components except the sky and clouds. Importantly, the work is intended to be displayed on the web alongside an online tutorial teaching users how to hack their own gaming systems.

->There are a couple of interesting aspects here; that being an evolution of how Internet Art is integrated into gallery spaces. This artwork was very well received in 2004, and would put Arcangel on the map in the NYC art scene. The piece is often referred to as impressionistic and otherwise painterly, or compared to the works of light artist James Turrell.

Internet Artist Hackers

Zapatista Tactical Floodnet, Electronic Disturbance Theatre, 1998.

-> EDT is a net.art collective, including members Ricardo Dominguez, Carmin Karasic, Brett Stalbaum and Stefan Wray. They describe themselves as a network of cyber activists and artists, who primarily performs electronic actions against the Mexican and US government. Their work began in June, 1998, to bring visibility to the war against Zapatistas in Mexico.

-> One of their works of what they call “Tactical Media” is an Java applet called FloodNet. This app is designed to open nonexistent Webpages as targeted sites; including those of the former president of Mexico Ernesto Zedillo, Bill Clinton etc. Participants who use the app are instructed to use words that can create “bad URLs” (web addresses for pages that don’t exist” on a certain website.

->The website’s server will create an ERROR message, and log the bad URL in their error log, and if enough users targeted the same website, could effectively overload the website’s server, causing it to slow down or crash.

Floodnet homepage, Electronic Disturbance Theatre. Image curtesy of Carmin Karasic.

etoy.TIMEZONE, etoy, 1998.

etoy.CORPORATION, 1996-today

->"the weak points of the internet and the twilight zone of the medium formed the location of the action. search-servers were transformed into a stage: etoy.UNDERGROUND FEEDING THE INFO-SPIDERS !"
-excerpt from their statement about digital hijack 1996.

->a group of European artists who formed in 1995 and set up the site www.etoy.com

-> They describe their ongoing work as that of “corporate sculpture”

-> In their first piece called digital hijack, they place one thousand keywords into the top ten lists of major search engines (porsche, startrek, bondage, censorship, fassbinder etc.) to show the illusion of individual agency in internet searches. They are bought their own timezone at one point.

®™ark, 2001-ongoing

-> ®™ark is a net.art community that appropriates the language and graphics of corporations online.

-> Their collective is anonymous in order to maintain the group’s corporate branding.

-> They are registered as a corporation which allows them to take advantage of the limitations of liability that protect business owners from legal damages. This gives the group further leeway in their anti-corporate and anti-government actions by using legal loopholes to protect members from financial risk.

-> In 1999, they launched GWBush.com, a spoof website of George W. Bush’s campaign website, which mocked the president and called on visitors to submit informal polls about the candidate to Bush’s campaign team.

The Hack is Free Information

OPUS, RAQS Media Collective, 2002

-> RAQS was formed in 1992 by media theorists and artists Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta in Delhi, India.

-> Their name exemplifies the nature of their work; it is used in Persian, Arabic and Urdu to describe an intensification of awareness through whirling, turning or being in a state of revolution. It also suggests a turning on its head of the English acronym, “FAQs,” subverting the homogenizing of information in the frequently asked, to instead foreground a more heterogenous and exploratory form of information gathering as a critical inquiry.

->Their website OPUS (Open Platform for Unlimited Signification) is a perfect example of their artistic mandate; to create environments for free information sharing. The project critiques the logics of sole authorship that are tied to physical space. Through image mapping RAQS, equates physical making to land ownership and borders. The artwork expresses the possibilities of forming open protocols for sharing information freely through creative spaces.

Blackness For Sale, Mendi and Keith Obadike, 2001

-> Keith and Mendi Obadike are a Black American artist duo who have been collaborating since 1996, beginning with the creation of conceptual internet art through gifs, hypertext and computer-generated sound. They continue their practice today, having expanded into large scale installation, public art, new media opera and sound art. Their practice combines poetry, music, writing and visual art

-> Mendi Obadike: “We did not feel that the net was a colorless space, but rather, that whiteness was being set up as the default.”

-> In 2001, the Obadikes listed Keith’s Blackness for sale through eBay’s digital auction, under the “Black Americana” category. The listing had no image, but did include a description of “Benefits and Warnings,” and the description also stated that the winning bidder would receive a letter of authenticity.

-> The piece is a example of absurdity and irony that is a key facet of much net.art; Keith and Mendi Obadike force the viewer to think about the ways in which Blackness is already for sale.

®™ark homepage, 2001.

OPUS homepage, RAQS Media Collective, 2002.

Mother of All Demos ll American Artist, 2021.

->American Artist has been working in the contemporary art and new media landscape since 2013, when they legally changed their name. This act was the first in a series of actions that incorporate the use of technology and performance focus on themes relating to “blackness, being, and resistance in the context of networked virtual life.”

-> American Artist: “The transition of the computer interface from a black screen to the white screen of the ’70s, is an apt metaphor… Blackness has, so to say, formed the ground for white.”

-> Mother of All Demos ll, is modelled after the 1977 Apple ll, which was the last computer to use a black background interface. The piece confronts how the Black workforce has historically been the least represented in Silicon Valley, as a black goo seems to spill off of the screen, onto the keyboard and into the white cube.