What is hacktivism ? The artist as hacker in the digital age
Today, the Internet is an extremely fertile ground for the proliferation of new agents and new forms of artistic production. On the other hand, the Net is quiet of a challenging environment, full of political, economic, and social controversies. For this reason, the Web from its most embryonic stages has been cross and delight for artists and researchers who investigate its forms and functions, in strokes of codes and pixels. The Internet as a device for cultural creation and diffusion is evolving, in an exponential, accelerated and inconstant way, artists on the Net have to build their legitimacy around a cloud made of bigger and bigger data.
As an art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta would say, « Art is the first to envision the change and the last to change ». If, on the one hand, the artist holds, now more than ever, the responsibility to face the mutations proper to the digital world, his role does not change: the artist questions contemporary codes, he appropriates and reinvents them. He becomes a collagist of the virtual, a remixer of cultures, an honest plagiarist by profession. In this perspective, the figure of the artist is associated with that of the hacker.
This article wants to evoke some key nodes of the link between art and computer piracy as aesthetic practice and socio-political statement, proposing a contemporary rereading of some examples of net hacktivism from the 90s to now.
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.
Hackers, philosophers, and navigators
A hacker is in its current conception a computer scientist capable of finding unconventional — and often illegal — solutions to infiltrate software or the Web. Artists who deal with software and Net.art often behave like social hackers, in the sense that they overturn the semiological structure of commonly used technological devices, with consequences on their social use.
In this sense, as the Dutch theorist Florian Cramer, says, it is possible to speak of poetry, elegance in programming but, above all, in hacking. According to Cramer, «a ‘hack’ describes this very activity itself, be it as a trick or deception, as an efficacious, but conceptually unclean intervention (…), or as a solution that is at once ingeniously simple and elegant, absorbing an abundance of issues in the densest possible form». For Cramer, a hack is like a Trojan horse: an ingenious, simple, and elegant solution that condenses problems and solves them. On the other hand, the hacker is the sophist, a philosopher of persuasion who deceives and/or convinces by combining the elegance of logical construction with the rhetorical force of the Latin stupor. Cramer argues that «In the Renaissance, ‘stupor’ became a crucial term for the rhetoric and poetics of ‘acumen’, that is, a wit driven by ingenium. While seventeenth-century theory was still conceived of ingenium as engineering, something that, like all rhetoric, could be taught by instruction, 100 years later the term mutated into the romanticist ‘genius’, which could no longer be learned but was a gift of nature. What happens then if hackers became the new role model of the artist?».
Piracy, plagiarism, and theft of content as an artistic statement is as subversive as it is classical and derives from a tradition of appropriation, détournement, and ready-made that goes back at least a hundred years from now. In this sense, the artist as a Net-hacktivist plays with the web, with his interface design, with the construction of alternative scenarios where (almost) everything is allowed. In this context, the verb ‘play’ is more relevant than ever, since playing means inventiveness, lightness, and passion in artists’ serious game. Playing is a necessary condition for hacker ethics, as the Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen explains in «The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age». Moreover, the artist as a hacker inherits his mainspring from the figure of the pirate, who, even before being a copyright thief, is by his etymological nature an explorer, the one who attempts, assaults, and, above all, navigates. The architecture of the web and its interface stubbornly use the metaphor of maritime navigation: the web route is cybernetic (κυβερνητικός, kubernētikós, means ‘good pilot’, ‘good navigator’), and the icon of the Safari browser is a blue compass. In the metaphor of the maritime navigation, the hacker artist claims possession of the rudder.
How did we get here? Hacking heritage from the 90s
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 advances in communication (in its efficiency and speed) that feed a post-modern artistic panorama: the primordial broth of internet-based art.
Among the pioneer artists of Net.art we find for example Russian artist Olia Lialina, her husband Dragan Espenschied, Net.art pioneer Alexei Shulgin, and the artistic duo JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans). These artists share the trend towards an aesthetic that digs into the newborn potential of website creation and questions the aesthetic and narrative potential of interface design. A trend that, moreover, often leads to strident audiovisual scenarios, full of bugs clicks so dear to glitch aesthetics. In particular, JODI’s works remix the visual codes proper to web interfaces by staging improbable, destabilizing hypertext paths, where commands cause errors and frightening (though harmless) dysfunctions. One of their ongoing project (from 2008) takes its name from the concept of “Folksonomy”, a cataloging system based on social tagging and proposes a sort of live juke-box in which artists manipulate found footage found on youtube, creating an audiovisual montage sometimes strident and cacophonic, symptom of visual distortion, forced and psychedelic. In reality, aesthetic unpleasantness plays a fundamental role in the process of visual construction. The disproportionate, disproportionate, de-hierarchized (and therefore, ‘folksonomic’) amount of visual material on the web, can certainly not be summarized in a placid narrative with pastel tones. At least, not for JODI.
The first generation of hacktivists has a cyberpunk imprint, both techno-enthusiastic and techno-critical, but also, and above all, feminist. The web immediately becomes the insidious but fertile ground to claim socio-political struggles and the ideal playground for Donna Haraway’s artistic daughters. The cyberfeminist imprint of hacktivism is affirmed thanks to artists and researchers like Cornelia Sollfrank, and Tatiana Bazzicchelli (founder of AHA, Activism, Hacktivism, Artivism, 2001). How do artists hack a both technical and institutional gender gap?
In 1997, the Hamburger Kunsthalle announced the first Net Art Extension design competition. Sollfrank simulates the registration of 289 female net-artists, assigning each one a name, a nationality, an email address, a website, and a phone number (Female extension, 1997). She entered each of these fake artists in the competition by submitting for each one a work of art automatically generated by a software program that the artist will then develop for her Net art generator. Sollfrank is delightfully surprised by the results: no female winner among the three finalists, but a huge media chaos around the female majority in the show. Those of Cornelia Sollfrank is a classic example, but still the world of art and technology does not seem to often wear skirts. Since gender equality in digital society is not guaranteed, activists, hacktivists and artivists invent counter-histories dripped in feminism, embodiments of the (disregarded) utopia of cyberspace at least a little more egalitarian.
What now ?
In the last 20 years, the Internet became more and more important for social and economical exchanges, and the web became a (hyper)object of global data exchange more than actual material goods. Since 2018, the artistic collective DISNOVATION.ORG has been working on a project entitled Profiling The Profilers, which proposes a reversal of the policy of micro-profilation by the big tech-companies (GAFAM: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft; NATU: Netflix, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber; BATX: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi). The user profiling system, which normally occurs through the decapitation of patterns and correlations between elements of large databases (behaviors, affiliations, connections based on clicks and likes), is overturned and used on the same profiler agents thanks to the extraction and analysis of hidden correlations from publicly available big datasets (ie. Wikipedia). In this way, their custom-made algorithm allows graphical visualization of the ethical-political inclination of the same companies that, without making it a secret, their clients know many things. DISNOVATION.ORG hack-reviewers are engaged to expose the correlation of information that is already present and accessible on the web, but whose form is modeled according to criteria of visibility and popularity, following a scheme that is usually hidden from a ‘basic’ user.
As visibility in the internet age detains at least as much power as secrecy, many artists focus their interest on cyber-surveillance or, as Eric Sadin would describe it “data-panopticism”, overturning the paradigms of who’s watched and who’s watching (and why). At the 58th Venice Biennale, Net.artist Shu Lea Cheang presents 3x3x6, an interactive and site-specific installation curated by Paul B. Preciado and staging the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni as a hyper-surveilled space. The Taiwanese artist and director is, among other things, a Net.art pioneer, a veteran hacktivist, and queen of the Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> (2001), an open online platform for free sharing of digital content. In 3x3x6 the visitor is invited to join an experiment of auto-surveillance, speculative fiction, and the construction of alternative storytelling, with a Foucauldian and cyberpunk flavor. The artist infiltrates the surveillance of his cells (measuring 3x3x6m) and then manipulates visitors’ faces, making them cross-racial, cross-gendered, and, more importantly, resistant to surveillance. Shu Lea Cheang’s prisons embody a new, unsettling the vocabulary of ancient and modern criminology, to create a queer and anti-colonial counter-history, in which the very concept of truth is subject to the laws of digital. Cheang’s hacking practice deals with surveillance, image property, and the redefinition of roles, genders, and mechanisms in the information society. Where online identity is multiple and fragmented, the artist affirms the need to subvert today’s network paradigms. In this sense, Cheang investigates and questions the iron curtain that constitutes online privacy today, and not only. Cheang’s artwork is, therefore, part of a rather traditional scheme of power hijack, and the artist is finally a David who questions one of his personal Goliath revealing and exposing the contradictions of a network society that exposes and tags everything and everyone.
Conclusions
The web has been from his birth the playground of artists who experiment by appropriating the visual and conceptual codes proper to the world of the Internet, deconstructing and reassembling them according to new and provocative configurations. The artists as hacktivists are, yesterday and today, the cursed poets of Html language, the creators of distorted narratives in binary code, the thieves who are not always gentlemen, the navigators, and the cultural remixers. In this sense their aesthetic action becomes political, questioning the pre-existing hierarchies of power, which in the web correspond to dates but also their exposure (or secrecy). Hacking as an artistic practice turns out to be a tool at the same time docile and subversive, and probably the aim of these Davids is not to defeat a Goliath but to tease its weak points and highlight its dysfunctions, its dis-novations, appropriating a virtual space, space where the artist has the legitimate responsibility to use, create, discuss, invent.
- Quaranta, Domenico. In Your Computer: Or How I Learned to Love the Art That Comes to You through Your Computer Screen, and Why You Should Learn to Love It as Well. Brescia: LINK, 2011, p.5
- Cramer Florian, Anti-Media, Rotterdam, Nai Uitgevers Pub, 2013, p. 221
- Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. London: Vintage, 2001.
- http://www.ecn.org/aha/English/index_en.htm
- http://www.artwarez.org/femext/index.html
- http://net.art-generator.com
- http://profilingtheprofilers.com
- Sadin Éric, La vie algorithmique (Algorithmic Life. Critique of Digital Reasoning). Paris: L’échapée, 2015.
- http://www.mauvaiscontact.info/kop/html/index.html
