In light of the current situation, M+ Hackathon — City of Objects on 22–23 February 2020 (Saturday-Sunday) will be rescheduled. Details will be announced on the West Kowloon Cultural District website www.westkowloon.hk in due course.
Programme Enquiries: mary.lo@mplus.org.hk
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Over the past two years, the M+ hackathons have given us an opportunity to reach out and engage with Hong Kong’s creative communities. The 2018 and 2019 editions helped us share the museum’s open access programme with wider audiences and celebrate the launch of the M+ Collections Beta website. Hackathon teams utilised the M+ open data set as raw material and presented a multitude of projects, ranging from data visualisation and experience design to games and artistic works. We are continually impressed by the creativity and passion we see in this forum and cannot wait to see new ideas and proposals.
The third edition, M+ Hackathon — City of Objects, introduces a focus on ‘objects’ and will be hosted at Eaton House on 22–23 February 2020. Learn more and sign up here.
This edition of the M+ hackathon is developed as a joint effort with our facilitators, designers, and educators Chun-wo Pat and Christian Marc Schmidt. It is the first event in ‘ObjectiCity’, a series of workshops designed by Pat and Christian. The series aims to encourage creative thinking and projects through unpacking the politics of objects in relation to their social and cultural contexts.
A Focus on Objects
As a museum of visual culture, M+ collects objects of all types: paintings, sculptures, graphic design, architectural models, archival ephemera — just to name a few. However, museums aren’t the only entities that collect. As individuals, everyone in the world collects objects that constitute ‘personal museums’, according to Pat and Christian:
‘Objects are all around us. They shape history and culture. The making of an object and the narrative that underlies it are an essential aspect of cultural identity. Objects are the reflection of a human thought process. They reveal our personal identity. In the vast digital network, objects are visual and virtual. They move between the haptic and the optic. Their meanings shift from time to time. They become an image, a memory. They create a new kind of identity that is untouchable. […]
Above all, […] [there’s probably] a new kind of museum where everyone is a curator and where objects in the home and the city are analogous to objects in a museum. We “curate” objects around us subconsciously through our experience and understanding. That “personal museum” shapes our perception and interaction with the world we live in.’
What You Can Expect
We encourage you to think deeply about objects in this hackathon. You can:
- Challenge perceptions on objects
- Think creatively about objects
- Build and develop: design projects that visualise objects, game projects that involve objects, learning projects inspired by objects
- Create something entirely new and unexpected — a project, a method, a process of thinking
Over 5,300 records from the M+ Collections are now online in our open data set and on our Collections Beta platform. This represents over 8,000 objects and more than 900 makers. This data (excluding images) has been released into the public domain and is available for you to utilise within this hackathon. A question we’d like to pose is: what relationships can we draw from our collections to everyday life? Visual culture is all around us — and we can see echoes of how visual culture appears in daily life within the M+ Collections in surprising and chance experiences.
Please note: Images won’t be released into the public domain, as the majority of copyright remains with our artists. However, we see this as an opportunity rather than a challenge, to be creative with how participants can represent objects. Read more about how copyright affects our open access approach.
Sign up now!
Join as an individual or as a team of up to four by signing up here. No coding required!
We’ll have food, drinks, and prizes prepared.
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About M+ Hackathons
M+ held its inaugural hackathon in 2018 and the second hackathon in 2019. Catch up on our previous hackathons here: 2018 and 2019.
This M+ Hackathon is generously supported by Eaton House.
Eaton House is a dynamic take on the modern working club, providing the space, tools, and community to support social entrepreneurs, activists, and artists working to make the world a better place. As a core pillar under Eaton Workshop, a global purpose-driven company founded by Katherine Lo, Eaton House members hail from a variety of fields and are selected by criteria based on a shared ethos and common cause: examining today’s world and conceiving of how we can make it better. Learn more about Eaton House.
