Upgrade! Talk At The CCA

I’m giving a short talk at the CCA on the 27th of July, as part of Upgrade!, a sort of inter­na­tional sym­po­sium for people who are inter­ested in inter­est­ing things to do with art and tech­nol­ogy. The event runs from 7pm to 9pm - artist Torsten Lauschmann will be talk­ing about his work too, with plenty of time left over for dis­cus­sion and arguments.

My bit will be about, very roughly speak­ing indeed, hack­ing and art, with an empha­sis on small inter­ven­tions, loose cou­plings of exist­ing ideas and tech­nolo­gies, stuff that I will take great pains to avoid call­ing ‘life hacks’, the for­mally exper­i­men­tal novels of B.S. John­son, stuff about social engi­neer­ing, stuff about art that requires the involve­ment of the viewer, the rela­tion­ship between all these things (if there is one), and some other things, too. There will also be covert cam­er­a­phone videos of folk keying in their PIN num­bers, and pro­jec­tions of excit­ing celebrity details drawn from Paris Hilton’s hacked Sidekick.

My por­tion of the evening will be, as you can see, a bit loose, but the idea of the Upgrade! events is to prompt lively debate more than to present a solid argu­ment. That’s my excuse, anyway.

Do come along.

Update: Here’s the offi­cial blurb for the talk, which may or may not make clear what it is I’ll be bang­ing on about:

> [Jack] will be talk­ing about, for want of a better word, hacks. For the pur­poses of this talk, hacks are small actions or con­cepts that may have large effects, loose cou­plings of exist­ing ideas that pro­duce unforseen con­se­quences, or any ele­gant inter­ven­tion that changes our under­stand­ing of a system. Though the roots of the term lie in the world of com­puter hack­ing, it can be applied to every­thing from changes indi­vid­u­als make to their own lives, artis­tic prac­tices devel­oped to engage audi­ences, or small shifts in soci­ety itself. It remains to be seen whether there is a rela­tion­ship between hacks and hack­ing in these dif­fer­ent fields.

Posted at 11am on 12/07/05 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture, news category.
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Tags: art, gigs, hacks, technology