Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a 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.
Sounds like quite an interesting talk and certainly one I’d like to attend. Sadly, I’ll be in London for a few days.
Hope it goes well.
Posted by Gary Fleming at 8am on 13.07.05