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.