Home

Welcome to the HackingP2_2020 wiki!

Here you will find a list of references and resources related to the theme of the course:

Pre-Course Theory material for Hacking:

Social Hacking, revisited by Florian Cramer

"What is a hacker? The same question was brought up in 1999 in Cornelia Sollfrank's lecture at the next Cyberfeminist International in Rotterdam, and answered, provisionally at least, with the nine definitions of the Jargon file, the famous self-written Internet dictionary of computer hackers". This article provides a series of comments and reflections on the definition of a 'hacker'.

Contra* Hacking with Alice Wong

Contra* is a podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design— broadly conceived —and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing. In this episode, you will hear an interview with the activist Alice Wong in which she will talk about the Disability Visibility Project, disabled people as makers and tinkerers, and also her contributions to articulating the concept of crip technoscience. Crip technoscience describes the work that disabled people do to redesign the material world, often with the political intention to contest compulsory able-bodiedness, militarism, and capitalism.

Hacking as Artistic Practice by !Mediengruppe Bitnik

!Mediengruppe Bitnik are contemporary artists. In their talk they will show two examples of their work, illustrating the translation of hacking from the computer field into an artistic practice. Bitnik will show how to hack the opera in ten easy steps and what happens when you send a parcel with a hidden live webcam to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Using the strategies of hacking, !Mediengrupppe Bitnik intervenes into settings with the aim of opening them up to re-evaluation and new perspectives.

Reading Writing research class:

Wendy Chun Control and Freedom. Chapter: Why Cyberspace?, pages 41-42 & 47-48

Alexander Galloway, Protocol. Chapter: Hacking, pages 167-169

MAIL ART/ NET ART / MEDIA ART REFERENCES:

!Mediengruppe Bitnik

DELIVERY FOR MR. ASSANGE, A LIVE MAIL ART PIECE(2013): «Delivery for Mr. Assange» is a 32-hour live mail art piece performed on 16 and 17 January 2013. On 16 January 2013 !Mediengruppe Bitnik posted a parcel addressed to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The parcel contained a camera which documented its journey through the Royal Mail postal system through a hole in the parcel. The images captured by the camera were transferred to this website and the Bitnk Twitter account in realtime. So, as the parcel was slowly making its way towards the Ecuadorian embassy in London, anyone online could follow the parcel’s status in realtime.

Postal Machine Decision (2018): Postal Machine Decision could be described as the remains of a performance, and is an homage to Ben Vautier’s 1965 work The Postman’s Choice: a postcard printed identically on both sides with different addresses, leaving it to the postman to choose where to deliver it. Seven illuminated letters out of the twenty-one that make up the title of the work hang on the wall. All of them were sent in separate packages (also on display) with two different addresses on them: only a third of them arrived at the gallery (on a screen, an animation traces their strange journey as they go back and forth between several locations).

Ulises Carrion

“Mail Art shifts the focus from what is traditionally called ‘art’ to the wider concept of ‘culture’… a Mail Art project is never closed. Every human being, even those who will never hear the question, can provide an infinite number of answers.”

Erratic Art Mail International System, 1977

Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners

In Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners (1981), a public project, lecture-performance, and video, Carrión analyzed systems of informal social communication including gossip, scandal, and rumor. In the project, he enlisted friends to spread gossip about himself throughout the city of Amsterdam, ultimately presenting a lecture in which he offered academic-style analysis and documentation of his “findings” about gossip. According to Carrión, “…gossip is a language communication chain, created by anonymous and collective effort, that evolves erratically within the frame of daily life in a particular social context.” Read more

Olia Lialina

End to end p2p my to me

Best Effort Network (2015/ 2020) refers to the way data packets find their way to a destination. This process is hidden and so we rarely see how packets are sometimes lost, bounced back, resent or received (or not). The work makes this process more tangible: Olia spins round and round on the carousel and if she disappears it means the website (best.effort.network) has been loaded on a different browser on a different screen. Olia will reappear when the request reaches the top of the queue of waiting browsers.Best Effort Network utilises a “best effort network” and so doesn’t provide any guarantee that data is delivered as expected or that the delivery meets any metric of quality: a comment on the parallels between the relinquishing of responsibility within the worlds of politics, social networks and consumerism once a product, post or policy is out of the hands of the maker.

In the animated piece Summer (2013) we see the artist swinging back and forth, infinitely looped, basking in bright sunlight. Cut out against a gradient background of blue and white, the swing is hung from the browser’s location bar. The animation’s eighteen still images are located on twenty-six different websites, with each site redirecting the browser from one server to the next, displaying the images in sequence and thus creating a cross-domain animation. The work is literally scattered across the internet, making it impossible to watch offline. The speed and rhythm of the image sequence, the animation itself, depends on internet infrastructure. It is the most fragile GIF on the internet; just one node down will result in breaking the work.

Further references:

Aram Bartholl, USB dead drops

Raphael Bastide & Louise Druhle, Renaming the Web

Networks of Trust, 2019