HACKING The (im)material

Hacking is a behaviour now deeply woven into the fabric of new media art practice. A playful, truculent and speculative survival strategy, a behaviour that is both a pragmatic necessity and a disruptive poetry for exploring an artistic vision that is entangled with the telematic, the (im)material and emergent technologies and experiences. This behaviour can be seen as a rubric for a creative practice that focuses on process, behaviour and systems thinking, something that (still) radically challenges the hegemony of the art market and art schools, places where all the old media art skulk.

This article tracks my engagement with this bad behaviour since an entanglement in telematic networks in the mid-1980s, where the hack was required to access software, terminals, remote servers and the network itself. But it was also a necessary behaviour to access the institutions and disciplines that were gatekeepers to these resources. It moves on to explore how this behaviour developed to construct , disrupt, dissect and reconstruct relationships with other artists and the frameworks and institutions that support them, such as galleries, museums, academia and funding organizations, through the hacking of power structures and disciplines as well as objects, architectures and bodies.