hacker in Constant 2015
and joined Constant for a few months
to document the various working practices at Constant
Variable. Between 2011 and 2014, Variable housed studios
for Artists, Designers, Techno Inventors, Data Activists,
Cyber Feminists, Interactive Geeks, Textile Hackers, Video
Makers, Sound Lovers, Beat Makers and other digital creators who were interested in using F/LOS software for
their creative experiments.
Why do you think people should use and or practice
Open Source software? What is in it for you?
Urantset
during a graffiti writer’s normal practice in the city’. In three interviews that took place in
Brussels and Paris within a period of one and a half years,
we spoke about the collaborative powers of the GMLstandard, about contact points between hacker and graffiti
cultures and the granularity of gesture.
Based on conversations between Evan Roth (ER), Femke
Snelting (FS), Peter Westenberg (PW), Michele Walther
(MW), Stéphanie Villayphiou (SV), John Haltiwanger (JH)
and momo3010.
Brussels, July 201
f code’?
There hasn’t been a programmatic way to archive graffiti. So this
is like taking a gesture and trying to boil it down to a set of coordinate
points that people can either upload or download. It is a sort of midpoint
between writers and hackers. Graffiti writers can download the software
and have how-to guides for how to do this, they can digitize their tags
ER
2
3
4
5
6
7
Theo Watson http://www.theowatson.com
In its simplest form, L.A.S.E.R. Tag is a camera and laptop setup, tracking a
and wanted to tie it back to someone, than it starts to be like
a surveillance camera. What happens when someone is caught with a
laptop with all this data?
FS
Your desire to archive, is it also about producing new work?
I see graffiti writers as hackers. They use the city in the same way
as hackers are using computer systems. They are finding ways of using
a system to make it do things that it wasn’t intended to do. I am not
sure graffiti writers see it this way, but I am in this position where I have
friends that are hackers, playing around with digital structures online.
Other friends are into graffiti writing and to me those two camps are
doing the most interesting things right now, but these are two communities that hardly overlap. One of the interests I have is maki
hat
part worked. Beyond that it has been a bit hard to keep the momentum.
Friends and colleagues send me ideas and ask me to look at things, but
people I don’t know are hard to follow; I don’t think they are publishing
their progress. There is a hackerspace in Porto that has been working on
it, so I see on their blog and Twitter that they are having meetings about
this and are working on it.
Don’t you think having only one prize produces a kind of exclusivity? It
seems logical not to publish your
drift towards entertainment uses, commercial uses.
ER
Do you think a standard can be subversive? You chose XML because it
is accessible to amateur programmers. But it is also a very formal standard,
and so the interface between graffiti writers and hackers is written in the
language of bureaucracy.
FS
ER (laughs) I thought that there was something funny with that. People
that know XML and the web, they get the joke that something so rigid
and standardized is connected to writing your name on the wall
capture a graffiti writer should have no more than 300
worth of equipment on him or herself.
I was trying to think of how the challenge could be gamed ... I did not
want to get into a situation where we were getting stressed out because some
smart hacker found a hole in the brief, and bought a next generation iPhone
that somehow just worked. I didn’t want to force people to buy expensive
equipment. This line was more about covering our own ass.
ER
–
The graffiti writer must be able to activate
his in Hip Hop,
of course. The whole idea of sampling, the whole idea of turning a playback
device into a musical instrument, the idea of touching the record: all of
these things are hacks. We could go into a million examples of how graffiti
is like hacker culture.
In terms of that handshake moment between the two communities, I think
that is about realizing that its not about the code and in some sense its not
about the spraypaint. There’s this empowering idea of individual small actors
assuming con
was interested in forms of appropriation art that instead of claiming
some kind of ‘super-user’ status for artists, might provide
a platform for open access and Free Culture not imaginable elsewhere. I’ve admired Cornelia’s contributions to
hacker culture for long. She pioneered as a cyberfeminist
in the 1990s with the hilarious and intelligent net-art piece
Female Extension 2 , co-founded Old Boys Network 3 and
developed seminal projects such as the Net Art Generator.
The opportunity to spend
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