>"Picture this. It’s 2017, we are the character [@observer](/user/profile/observer) on one of freenode’s IRC channels, while Tz4R4, dchmp and B_All are watching the newest !Mediengruppe Bitnik hack with awe: if you type"
>"Picture this. It’s 2017, we are the character [@observer](/user/profile/observer) on one of freenode’s IRC channels, while Tz4R4, dchmp and B_All are watching the newest !Mediengruppe Bitnik hack with awe: if you type"
Do you think that Hanna Höch would have created her collages in Gimp? That Picabia would have used microcontrollers? That Rose Sélavie would have her tweets going viral? Or that Hugo Ball would have written a bunch of Wikipedia articles about the DADA movement? I definitely think so. Except that without them behind us, we wouldn’t have had and used all these tools the way we do now. This text is an attempt to demonstrate why. It starts out from the assumption that there is something eerily common in the workings of the historical avant-garde and of hacker cultures, and methodologically examines them from different angles to rationalize this assumption and look at how this close kinship brings about hacktivist artworks.
Do you think that Hanna Höch would have created her collages in Gimp? That Picabia would have used microcontrollers? That Rose Sélavie would have her tweets going viral? Or that Hugo Ball would have written a bunch of Wikipedia articles about the DADA movement? I definitely think so. Except that without them behind us, we wouldn’t have had and used all these tools the way we do now. This text is an attempt to demonstrate why. It starts out from the assumption that there is something eerily common in the workings of the historical avant-garde and of hacker cultures, and methodologically examines them from different angles to rationalize this assumption and look at how this close kinship brings about hacktivist artworks.