HACKTIVISM(S) What is hacktivism? The artist as hacker in the digital age / Digital Avant-garde, Artistic Agency, and the Reconnection to Meaningful Networks Interview with Alessandro Ludovico / Want to know more about it? Our anthology on Hacktivism / Danae’s cultural agenda Selected exhibitions to experience Danae · Issue n°1 January 2021 As a network for artists, curators and collectors of digital art, Danae’s mission is to discover and commit in today’s digital avant-garde. Danae’s new Magazine presents thematic overviews on contemporary digital art practices. About the current issue: We share our insights on contemporary hacktivism, we review some classic writings about art and hacking, we interview Alessandro Ludovico (former hacktivist and media critic), and we explore some on and offline artistic events. In adverse but interesting times, the digital evolution and revolution increasingly embodies social and political struggles. For this reason, the marriage between art and computer piracy is both an aesthetic practice and socio-political statement. We are talking about Hacktivism(s), plural and mutant practices which share the same will to face counterfactual realities. How do today’s practices of artistic hacking assume legitimacy in an on and offline art world? Hacking, as a practice with a modern form and ancient values, as the spearhead of network (sub)culture, demands this very legitimacy. DANAE [email protected] | danae.io Contents 06What is hacktivism ? 18Interview with Alessandro Ludovico 28 38Danae’s cultural agenda Want to know more about it ? Artist as hacker in the digital age Digital Avant-garde, Artistic Agency, and the Our anthology on hacktivism Selected exhibitions to experience this month Reconnection to Meaningful Networks Today, the Internet is an extremely fertile ground for the proliferation of new agents and new forms of artistic production. cktivism HacktivismOn the other hand, the Net is quiet of a Hack- Ha challenging environment, full of politi- cal, economic, and social controversies. For this reason, the Web from its most embryonic stages has been cross and tivism Hacktivismdelight for artists and researchersHacktivism who investigate its forms and functions, in strokes of codes and pixels. The Internet as a device for cultural creation and diffu- Hacktivism Hacktivismsion is evolving, in an exponential, acce- Hack- lerated and inconstant way, artists on the Net have to build their legitimacy around a cloud made of bigger and bigger data. tivism Hacktivism As an art critic and curator Hacktivism Domeni- co Quaranta would say, « Art is the first to envision the change and the last to change »1. If, on the one hand, the artist Hacktivism Hacktivismholds, now more than ever, the responsi- What is bility to face the mutations proper to the digital world, his role does not change: the artist questions contemporary codes, Hacktivism Hacktivismhe appropriates and reinvents them. He Hack- becomes a collagist of the virtual, a re- hacktivism mixer of cultures, an honest plagiarist by profession. In this perspective, the figure tivism Hacktivismof the artist is associated with that ofHacktivism the hacker. This article wants to evoke some key no- Hacktivism desHacktivism of the link between art and computer Hack- piracy as aesthetic practice and socio-po- litical statement, proposing a contempo- rary rereading of some examples of net tivism Hacktivismhacktivism from the 90s to now. Hacktivism How do today’s practices of artis- tic hacking assume legitimacy in an on and offline art world? Hacking, as Hacktivisma practice Hacktivism with a modern form and Hack- ancient values, as the spearhead of network (sub)culture, demands this The artist as hacker in the digital age, by Angelica Ceccato tivism Hacktivismvery legitimacy. Hacktivism Hacktivism Hacktivism Hackti- vism Hacktivism Hacktivism Hack- tivism Hacktivism Hacktivism Hacktivism A hacker is in its current conception In this sense, as the Dutch theorist Flo- a computer scientist capable of fin- rian Cramer, says, it is possible to speak ding unconventional - and often ille- of poetry, elegance in programming gal - solutions to infiltrate software but, above all, in hacking. According to or the Web. Artists who deal with sof- Cramer, «a ‘hack’ describes this very ac- tware and Net.art often behave like tivity itself, be it as a trick or deception, as social hackers, in the sense that they an efficacious, but conceptually unclean overturn the semiological structure of intervention (...), or as a solution that is commonly used technological devices, at once ingeniously simple and elegant, with consequences on their social use. absorbing an abundance of issues in the densest possible form»2. For Cramer, a hack is like a Trojan horse: an inge- nious, simple, and elegant solution that condenses problems and solves them. Hackers, philosophers, Thomas Webb, Depressed Twitter, website, 2019, courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE Ber- lin, London, Tokyo and navigators On the other hand, the hacker is the so- Piracy, plagiarism, and theft of content the Spirit of the Information Age»4. Mo- phist, a philosopher of persuasion who as an artistic statement is as subversive reover, the artist as a hacker inherits his deceives and/or convinces by combining as it is classical and derives from a tra- mainspring from the figure of the pirate, the elegance of logical construction with dition of appropriation, détournement, who, even before being a copyright thief, the rhetorical force of the Latin stupor. and ready-made that goes back at least is by his etymological nature an explo- Cramer argues that «In the Renaissance, a hundred years from now. In this sense, rer, the one who attempts, assaults, and, ‘stupor’ became a crucial term for the the artist as a Net-hacktivist plays with above all, navigates. The architecture of rhetoric and poetics of ‘acumen’, that is, a the web, with his interface design, with the web and its interface stubbornly use wit driven by ingenium. While seventeen- the construction of alternative scenarios the metaphor of maritime navigation: the th-century theory was still conceived of where (almost) everything is allowed. In web route is cybernetic (κυβερνητικός, ingenium as engineering, something that, this context, the verb ‘play’ is more re- kubernētikós, means ‘good pilot’, ‘good like all rhetoric, could be taught by ins- levant than ever, since playing means navigator’), and the icon of the Safari truction, 100 years later the term mutated inventiveness, lightness, and passion browser is a blue compass. In the me- into the romanticist ‘genius’, which could in artists’ serious game. Playing is a ne- taphor of the maritime navigation, the no longer be learned but was a gift of na- cessary condition for hacker ethics, as hacker artist claims possession of the ture. What happens then if hackers be- the Finnish philosopher Pekka Hima- rudder. 3 came the new role model of the artist?» . nen explains in «The Hacker Ethic and 2Cramer Florian, Anti-Media, Rotterdam, Nai Uitge- 1Quaranta, Domenico. In Your Computer: Or How I vers Pub, 2013, p. 221 Learned to Love the Art That Comes to You through 3Ibid. 3 Your Computer Screen, and Why You Should Learn to 4Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of Love It as Well. Brescia: LINK, 2011, p.5. What is hacktivism the Information Age. London: Vintage, 2001. Jonas Lund, Curated By Jonas Lund’s work involves a reversal of traditional curatorial practices. The artist submits the documen- tation of museums and art institutions to Google’s automatic search. As an anti-curator, Lund appro- priates the contradictions and clashes of networking artistic documentation. Jonas Lund, Curated By, Video, 2013, 2:10 min (still), courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo. The 90s are a key moment for the history of information technology as well as for art history. New forms of archiving emerge that are increasingly compact, performing, and accessible to the general public, and with them new forms of production and consumption. New sounds and new images circulate on CDs, cassettes, on the first laptops, and it is these same ad- vances in communication (in its efficiency and speed) that feed a post-modern artistic pano- rama: the primordial broth of internet-based art. Among the pioneer artists of Net.art we How did we get find for example Russian artist Olia Lia- lina, her husband Dragan Espenschied, Net.art pioneer Alexei Shulgin, and the here? Aram Bartholl, Sad By Design, 2019, Gif, Performative Sculpture, Wood, Paper, Fire, HD artistic duo JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Video, 4 x2,7 x 1,2, courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE Berlin, London, Tokyo Dirk Paesmans). These artists share the Hacking heritage trend towards an aesthetic that digs into the newborn potential of website creation from the 90s and questions the aesthetic and narrative The first generation of hacktivists address, a website, and a phone 6 potential of interface design. A trend that, has a cyberpunk imprint, both tech- number (Female extension, 1997 ). moreover, often leads to strident audiovi- no-enthusiastic and techno-critical, She entered each of these fake ar- sual scenarios, full of bugs clicks so dear but also, and above all, feminist. tists in the competition by submit- to glitch aesthetics. In particular, JODI’s The web immediately becomes ting for each one a work of art au- works remix the visual codes proper to the insidious but fertile ground to tomatically generated by a software web interfaces by