OK, so please join me on stage.
OK, thank you very much, everyone, for great presentations.
And I want to pick up again on the notion of hacking itself.
I think all of your presentations have shown very nicely that you understand the term very,
very broadly, except for Tobias's pieces.
None of them was what could be considered a malicious technological hack, which I'm sure
is what Amazon thought of it, you know, even if we see it as a very different intervention.
But to all of you, technology in and of itself doesn't seem to play the main role in hacking.
All of you also understand hacking as a cultural technology independent act.
So I would like to hear a little bit more about what your goals are and what makes a successful
hack.
We've heard a lot about empowerment.
Some of you actually reflect on systems by taking them apart and creating kind of bruises
that reveal their mechanisms in many ways.
So again, what would you individually describe as your goals and your ideals when it comes
to achieving a successful hack?
What do you want people to take away from it?
Anyone?
I'm not so shy.
I'm just taking pictures.
OK, I'll talk.
I was distracted by the picture.
So I think what's interesting about hacking and the way that we all actually approach
it on who's on stage is that generally to get people's attention, I think yelling and
being crazy and angry don't necessarily elicit a positive response.
So in a way, a lot of our projects are kind of a hack and a hack with a sense of humor.
So we're taking something that maybe would, for me, a good example would be the Pirate
Bay plug-in, bringing up the lack of women in open source or in hacking.
I think doing that in an angry, screaming bitch sort of way doesn't go over well.
But when you bring comedy into it, people tend to accept it, or they tend to accept
it and then think about maybe why they're accepting it.
Yeah, I think Fat Lab does this.
I mean, the people within Fat do this, I think, pretty well, where it's oftentimes humors
using being used along with this hack, whether that's part of it or not, to kind of spread
some other message.
I've heard of it.
The influencers, I don't know.
I always credit, even Franco, tell me if I'm wrong about this, but call it radical entertainment.
Is that your saying?
So I love this phrase, this idea of radical entertainment, that someone might come to
this media just because they want to see it.
They don't come because of the politics, but then there's some other message that can
go through there.
Any other?
Yeah, I think this connects here.
It's also very much about the entertainment, but also about putting out tutorials.
And James also just showed all these projects, so a hack or something very easy to pick up
and to do yourself and spreading ideas.
That actually leads to another question and not that you can't respond to the first one
still.
If you look at the traditional definition of hacking, it's either using expert skills
to hack into a system or it's being unskilled to just being a tennis hacker or whatever.
What role does skill play in your work and how important do you think skill is to hacking?
Because that also varies radically from project to project, I would say.
Yeah, it's a skill.
It's a skill intensive activity, whether it's on a computer or otherwise.
I remember when the phone-freaking world was my first introduction to hacking, when I first
met people who said, I'm a hacker, I make free, long-distance phone calls, I plug my
computer in the back of the Republican National Headquarters or whatever this type of thing.
The hacking skill was actually nine-tenths of the job was social.
You would talk to somebody and you would speak to them in some way where they would disclose
something that you needed as a key to move on to the next level and so on and so forth
and it was quite skillful performance, like a performance practice.
We've definitely done unskillful things.
I'd say a lot of our things are unskillful.
We have an awareness of it and if it was a more seasoned practitioner, they could make
more stuff come to life.
Like the Google car, one of the best things about this is fun, but the downside is fun
too.
As soon as something stops being fun, we stop, so it starts getting really intense or hard.
We quit.
So yeah, we're kind of low, like maybe low skill hackers.
There could be like an elegance to the lack of skill too, right?
Yeah.
I feel the lazy like a fox thing too, but sometimes we just quit when it's cold.
It's also very different skills, I think.
Sometimes it's a coding skill, like the classic hacking skill, but also yeah, skillsome.
There's also a conceptual skill in devising it, like a new project, also the speed project.
It's all about unskilled or very often unskilled fast interventions, but creating that conceptual
framework also requires skill, of course.
So also broadening it up to the question of art and how does hacking and how do hacking
and art intersect?
I would say hacking per se isn't art, but what makes a hack art?
Do you consider yourselves artists or do you just not care because you have a cultural
impact and a playing field and being part of that art world, coming back to James's
diagram of the little black sheep just doesn't matter or there's a point to building a counter
model to it?
What are those relationships for you?
I mean, I call myself an artist, but it took me a while to come around to that.
I think that might be true for several people in the group.
I don't know.
I think one thing that is, there's an audience thing going on there, right, where there is
an art audience we're addressing, at least some of us, but it's almost never just the
art audience.
A lot of the work, I think people up on stage especially are making here, we might be making
work that does have a discourse in an art context, but then there is always this other
audience, like James was talking about in his slide, and having these two groups of
people looking at the same project can actually be quite difficult, having these two groups
of people that might be just entertainment, it might be art criticism, and getting them
talking about these same pieces I think is tricky.
But I think that is a legitimate art practice, I think that is what a lot of us are doing.
But is there anything that would distinguish heck per se from art to you?
I mean, I have no doubts about you being artists or fitting in within the artistic context,
and a few of you are in the collection of institutions such as MoMA and others, but
what makes a heck art or not?
We already saw the show, besides, if I say it's art, it's art approach to it.
Well, I mean, a lot of the work of the contemporary art world is, you know, it's self-facing,
you know, it operates within this sort of world, and the terms and figures people in
that world kind of understand.
So I mean, you know, we're showing our work in museums, and you know, the work that GRL
did with graffiti, I mean, certainly graffiti artists consider what they do as an art practice,
and we were kind of bouncing off their artistic practice, or even licking, I mean, it's in
a museum, so all these kind of terms and figures of museum world, you start to have to calculate
them to come up with meaning and things like this, so, you know, there are very few projects
that weren't, like it clearly, they felt like, oh, this is seated in the art world, but the
eye writer wasn't so much, you know, so that was always a project that kind of surprised
me why people in the art world responded so strongly.
Does everyone know the eye writer, or, yeah?
It's the glasses, the glasses so you can draw with just using your eye movements, yeah.
I mean, it was just pure cost reduction, you know, and we weren't either, we weren't critiquing
the industry either, it wasn't that sort of critical look and dissection of kind of a
practice of making these incredibly expensive tools for graffiti art, I mean, for paralyzed
people when typically most people can't afford them, especially someone in medical, under
medical care can't afford them, so it was just pure, like, look at what we can make
it for much cheaper, and then the art world responded, so then that's another thing is
that whatever we do, someone's, they're dragging it into that space, and we end up showing
it and positioning it and, you know, making, you know, our friends dragging them into it
to do things also in an art context.
This might be a difference too with some of the work you were showing that was more utilitarian,
some of the Brazilian movement, the gambiological movement, I think it's, there's like a necessity
to it like you were saying, right, and that might be a difference too where some of those
things, yes, they may be hacks, but they might not be placed within an art context, they're
not meant to do some of the things that art is meant to do, I mean, that's a bigger conversation
right, but how we relate to the world as humans, how we see the world around us, these bigger
issues that art does, I think some of the hacks, they might solve the problem, but they
might also address those issues as well.
I think especially you Evan have, you have often in your talks this very nice slide of,
and the hack again is there to entertain the board office networks like the internet and
the mess, yeah, the masses of people, and at the same time the art field, so it's like
bridging these two spheres is again a hack, but also, yeah, I mean, just coming back to
that question, what makes a hack an art piece, like sometimes it's both, and then like, yeah,
getting in there is like the art piece sort of.
And I think it's also a very unique situation we're looking at with digital media or today's
technologies that they can function in these different contexts, they do not necessarily
have a safe place in the art world, you know, the art institutions are still very much struggling
with accommodating this work or even recognizing it, but at the same time, the work has a huge
audience outside the institution too, and can play it both ways.
And another thing that you suggested or picked up on is this idea of not just art, art can
be a functional tool, there were the times where you would distinguish design from art
by saying, oh, design is something functional, and art never, that doesn't function, it is
something else, but of course in many of these projects, they are really functional tools,
and at the same time, they are art.
I don't know if you have examples of reflection of the art world itself on hacks or the issues
of hacking, there was an exhibition I mentioned, open source art hack that was at the new museum
almost a decade ago, Jenny Marketu, who is here, co-curated that exhibition.
One of the projects was shut down pretty much immediately because of port scanning and it
created huge problems for the institution, and hacking, bringing real hacks, showing
your project, for example, in an established art museum, would probably attract a kind
of attention, bring a kind of attention to the institution that would be difficult to
handle for them.
So that type of work probably doesn't have a comfortable place in the art world in general.
But what can the art world learn from hacking practice is also one of my questions.
This one recent example from Kyle McDonald, who did this intervention at the Mac store,
and probably most of you know it, the webcam recording app he installed in the shops, and
yeah, I mean, it's like hacking networks in the 80s, 90s, especially in Germany, it was
like the CCC, the KS Computer Club, they were hacking Deutsche Bank or whatever, and there
were like news articles about it, but today in times of like cyber war, it's really, it's
not a fun thing anymore, it's really, yeah, very, yeah, by the authorities taken down
then, I mean, so we saw what happened there, so in the, there's still that discussion
going, yeah, but it's an art piece, but they don't care about it.
And in the end, the only people that get in trouble, and maybe this is why it's so easy
to make friends with that community, is that with all this work here, I don't think we've
had one C&D, one public denial, like anything on the level of like identity theft or identity
theft and some probably other like traffic laws.
We've been using NBC's logo for five years now.
There's never any of that.
The only person that gets in trouble is when Katsu gets a little bit of gold paint on the
museum right next door, so still on some fundamental level, like, yeah, I don't know if it means
we're not pushing the right buttons or the buttons can't even be pushed anymore.
I mean, I think that that's, it may be that so sophisticated, companies are so sophisticated,
they just, they just stay away from this as a danger zone, even if maybe embrace it a
little bit, because we're doing damn marketing for them on some level, whether we like it
or not.
Showing us up, I guess, as the hacker in the group, right?
I mean, we're in here busting our ass, making cars and signs and all these things, and he
just throws some paint up on the wall, and the conversation is that now, right?
Yeah.
I also want to talk, before we open it up to questions from the audience, talk a little
bit about software development in general.
I mean, part of FATLAB is also, you know, open source development, you know, as you
are hacking systems, you're always creating new systems.
I think that's at the core of hacking as Mackenzie Warke has pointed out in his Hacker Manifesto
2, and what interests me is also how these developments, open source software development
and their mechanisms, intersect with or counter the corporate world.
In our previous, in our email conversation, I used the example of release often and early
as a paradigm that works really well for that open source community, and then, of course,
it's something that corporations do as basically better testing on the market for making profit,
you know, they always are developing already the next chip, the next whatever, while we
are sitting there frustrated with our technology and testing it for them.
So what works in one kind of circle world, you know, maybe exactly the opposite and a
for-profit paradigm in another one, so there are different ways of governmentality and
approaches in these different areas of development.
So I wanted to hear a little bit more about the relationship of hacking of open source
development and in the industry.
How many of us work at corporations?
I mean, within the group, there's a really wide range of approaches.
I don't think the group thinks that the work we're making has to be the way art is, it
has to be the way open source is, like, you know what I mean, I think that this is just
what we're doing because this is fun, I mean, part of what's driving us is the same thing
that's driving Linux, like, this is a group where, I mean, one of the reasons why we don't
apply for funding, why we don't try to get money, which we probably could get from time
to time is because it makes it less fun in this group for what it is, I think is driven
to make things because it's this little escape for us, you know, and I don't think that has
to be true for everything.
There's people in the group that have jobs that are making money and doing various different
things, but this is our little escape to be making work where we don't have to worry about
that for a change.
And I think I feel that relief as an artist, I think there's people in the group that feel
that relief from jobs, like, this is our little respite from having to deal with those
things.
But beyond being a respite, I think it's also developing very important alternative models
sometimes.
I mean, sometimes it's more fun, but in other cases, it also really provides alternative
ways.
Yeah, because I think fun, like, is honest, right?
I think if you're really making things because there's not a lot of things getting between
you and why you're making that work, and so I think, yeah, I don't think everything has
to be developed that way, but yeah, I think it is an interesting way to make things because
of that honesty.
And this is why it spreads so well on the internet is because the internet is so hungry
for honest content.
I mean, I actually think a lot of the things we've developed, we've developed out of that
need.
It's not because we want to change the world or do something interesting, it's a purely
selfish need.
Like, for me, developing a laser saw was really about needing a laser cutter, but I couldn't
afford one.
Same with the eye writer, I think it had a similar motivation, this idea that you need
a technology and you can't afford it.
And by developing it as an open source project, you kind of have these...
You develop the alternative and with the hope that maybe it becomes ubiquitous to the point
that other people can develop it and develop it cheaper.
So I think that's a very common motivation for a lot of open source projects.
You know, I was thinking, I mean, the question kind of...
It puts forth to...
I mean, the idea that there's sort of these two worlds that are quite evenly divided between
the people that do things for fun and the people that do things for profit.
I mean, I know...
I don't want to divide it that clearly, you know, and I think there's a lot of overlap.
But I do think that the world that does it for fun did demonstrate a lot of interesting
new processes, you know.
And then the corporate world tries to, you know, they try to translate those processes
into whatever their goals are, which, you know, are in the end to make a profit and oftentimes
the means that they get there are, you know, wrought with societal ills, you know.
But the fact that they're using open processes is sometimes working very well for the same
reason it would work for us, you know.
And I think that's overall a positive thing.
And you know, like, we give Google lots of shit constantly.
And their Glass project is an example of open innovation, right, that's what they call open
innovation.
They're releasing this product onto the market in a kind of a beta form, they're trickling
it out in a sort of, you know, like, let them eat cake kind of way.
And we're getting our glasses and we're starting this conversation about, like, oh, but people
are going to tape me and blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, like, that's good.
I mean, I do think they want that.
I mean, I do think that they know that there's no road that doesn't go through across that
Rubicon, you know.
We have to agree to accept that we can now record each other at any time and jack into
our friends' eyes and be sort of everywhere simultaneously, you know, sort of this nowhere
space between our eye and piece of acrylic.
And so that's positive.
I mean, I think now the ball falls into our court and what we've discovered with this
thing is that we don't care about that conversation that much.
We're just like, oh, shit, what is that?
Oh, my God, you know.
So I mean, in some cases they're giving us an opportunity to think about it and using
these processes in a positive way, you know, and maybe, you know, we're on the edge of
being too dumb to care.
I think what's really interesting is we're kind of at this point in this 21st century
where the line between the digital and the real has dissolved and what happens.
And you know, you meet someone and you can look up their Facebook profile and you know
more about them than you would know if you've had a relationship with them for 10 years.
And I don't always think that people are conscious of that.
So it's an interesting point to be in, especially as an artist and kind of a hacktivist and
open source person is this place where we have access to so much information about so
many people at the same time while also knowing them in real life.
Okay.
I think this is maybe a good point for opening it up to questions from the audience.
So.
Hello.
Okay.
Behind.
Probably behind.
There we have it.
That's an interesting slide.
