Reality hacking
|
|
Reality hacking is an artistic practice that takes emerges from the intersection of hacking and hacker culture, contemporary art, activism, and net culture. Reality hacking takes as its basis a broad, phenomenological point of view of the world, and considers (often unorthodox) investigations into everyday objects and situations a meaningful way of probing into the working of varied social contexts.
History
The word 'hacking' or 'hacker' comes from the 1960s when the first computer hackers emerged at MIT, and later took root in actions such as phone phreaking, BBS culture, and virtual sit-ins in the 90s.
Art movements such as Fluxus and Happenings in the 70s created a climate of receptability in regards to loose-knit organizations and group activities where spontaneity, a return to primitivist behavior, and an ethics where activities and socially-engaged art practices became tantamount to aesthetic concerns.
The conflation of these two histories in the mid-to-late 90s resulted in cross-overs between virtual sit-ins, electronic civil disobedience, denial-of-service attacks, as well as mass protests in relation to groups like the IMF and World Bank. The rise of collectivies, net.art groups, and those concerned with the fluid interchange of technology and real-life (often from an environmental concern) gave birth to this new practice.
Forms
(soon)
Practitioners
Reality hacking has many different types of practitioners, varying from art-historical methods of inquiry to others that are more nebulous.
- Space-Hijackers (http://www.spacehijackers.co.uk/)
- RealityHacking (http://www.realityhacking.com/)
- Fravia's web searchlores (http://www.searchlores.org/)
- Surveillance Camera Players (http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html/)
- Le Parkour (http://www.le-parkour.com/)