The big worlds and small shows_Hackers can only laugh out laud

I'm starting my reporting job on this blog with the review of the small, but significant show called System Hack, and there are some reasons for that. Over the last few years I had an opportunity to see a number of monumental exhibitions, overwhelmed with prestigious concepts and productions, sub-events, concurrent discussions and so on... No matter how much the topics and displays were interesting or not, elaborated or not, critical or not, I couldn't avoid the feeling of the great compromise. The logic of world market and its neo-liberal ideological setting was always in the foreground plan somehow, despite the occasional intentions to be criticized, at least through the curatorial statements. In the kingdom of sensations, this logic appears as a kind of a display over display, a tiny net that actually interconnects this beautiful and well-meant ideas, objects and concepts. It is less about the sale of cultural production as the result of competition of biennials and other exhibition blockbusters [where the brains of the visitor aiming to have a complete overview reaches the point of short-circuit or meltdown]. It is more about the plan in which the criticality of contemporary art easily ends up in the polite representation of the friendship of the all the people of the world. On the slippery terrain of demands of corporate investors and contemporary art foundations, the politics of participation of all people of the world in the mutual and global well being easily slides to the false universality of 'The United Colors of Benetton'. Export of political issues into the sphere of cultural production and attempts to conceive contemporary culture as the site of [symbolic] overcoming of the political problems [... of race, class differences etc] goes hand in hand with the evaluation of success of contemporary art projects after the number of visitors and amount of commissioned reviews. This makes contemporary art to be the ultimate symbol of neo-liberal modernization, which is the reason of its recent popularity worldwide. System Hack can be definitely read in relation to these processes. Of course, only as “something completely different”.

Visiting the System Hack show was definitely an exciting experience - very much resembling the adventure of being taken to a secret place. It was hosted in the room 101 of Hotel Kasina - one of the oldest hotels in Belgrade, which still resists the overwhelming gentrification of the city. The hotel has a central, yet a bit hidden location, and quite unspectacular architecture, done in various styles, layer by layer.

The girl-guide was welcoming the visitors in the hotel lounge, where they were supposed to wait for the next guided tour. I joined the last, the minute before the tour started. The scene that I already found there was the one of people sitting on the low beige armchairs under the gloomy light and producing clouds of smoke which slowly elevated to the high ceiling. I will tend to plug this scene into the exhibition experience.

Climbing up the stairs covered with dark-red carpet and entering the corridor of the same color, I couldn't avoid evoking of surreal and bizarre images from films by Lynch. It didn't last long enough to get lost in the 'wrong story', but it made me wonder for the moment: Whether all those images [of hotel, people, architecture, social and spatial arrangements...] are belonging to the curated experience of the exhibition, or it is just a symptom of subjectivation of 'us' – the visitors of strange shows of all kinds - into the fiction of the artworld and sensuality of aesthetic experience...
The curators of the show, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak [who, with a good reason, wanted to be called historians] have stimulated the visitors to let loose their imagination. Their idea was to replace artifacts by a narrative, a story-telling approach of the historians - guides of the museum. System Hack was iconoclastic, but still one sensual show. Instead of austere [hack]activist use of technical lingo that n0b0dy understands and pedagogical preaching about the alternatives to the dominant techno-world, they decided to enact the situation of, let's say, a visit to the science museum and joining the cool guided tour.

This 'museum' is located in the hotel apartment where Tom and Marcell stay overnight. Around 20 visitors sit in the circle on sofas, chairs and floor. Marcell and Tom tell the stories and show the artifacts as the proofs of their narration. Artifacts are small and can fit in the hand. Visitors are offered non-alcoholic drinks. The lights are dimmed. The background fills the sound of radio play of H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds.
Marcell and Tom are members of Multimedia Institute MAMA, definitely the regional hacktivist’s heaven. Tom is writer, translator, editor and organizer of numerous publications, discussions and symposiums dedicated to the issues of technology, art, politics, society and economy. Marcell is musician, programmer, artist and GPL activist. They are both performers, and we could tell…

The System Hack show was wrapped around two topics:

The first one was about understanding technological practices and the alternative use of the technology against the predominant corporative rules of the science and entertainment industries. Tom made the comparation with the term 'institutional critique' and tendencies of a certain art movements in the sixties and seventies. He considered 'institutional critique' to be the form of a hack in the predominant logic of institution of art and it's representative governmental and corporative bodies.

The second was about the figure of Hacker. At the conference which accompanied the show Marcell reminded us about the popular movies [like Swordfish], depicting hackers as a superpowerfull characters capable of remotely destroying the safest systems even if held at gunpoint and distracted by felacio; this representation speaks about the ‘society which creates heroes as it strives to find someone to stigmatize in order to shift the focus from the traumatic spots it doesn't want to face'. During the guided tour he argued that the hacker is not an isolated genius who does not know how to deal with social life, because hacker is usually a collective, not a solitary individual. Hackers have an understanding that technology does not function, and that uneasy knowledge which hacker represents is the opposite to what society wants - society wants to believe in technology.

The topics caught my attention, and Tom&Marcell were good historians. Visitors, a curious crowd of local geeks, activists, conceptual art lovers and some guests from Scandinavia, actively participated in the discussion, but didn't take over the show. The guests-participants, Patrice Riemens and Benjamin Mako Hill, generously joined the narration about the six famous hacks of the XX and XXI century.

The first story was about radio hack from 1938. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air adopted famous science fiction novel The War of the Worlds [about Martians invading the earth] to sound like a live newscast report. The technique, which presumably was intended to heighten the dramatic effect, had produced one of the most (in)famous mistakes in the history. In the atmosphere of growing tension and the anxiety in the days leading up to the World War II, many people confused fiction for reality and started to produce panic in the streets. Welles and Mercury Theatre escaped punishment, but not censorship, and CBS had to promise never again to use the 'we interrupt this program' prompt for dramatic purposes. While the era of the radio created modern political public sphere, through the real-time transmission and homogenization of space into a unitary space of events, the War of the Worlds made apparent that the broadcasting media had made the contemporary political event a fluid category.

The second hack was based on the unexpected use of the whistle from the cereal box [we all remember those little prizes - cheap toys, also known as the 'premiums', from the bottom of the boxes of corn and oats and whatnot] for making free international phone calls. Of course, a little bit of a geeky mind was needed for this creative operation. John T. Draper, later known as the Captain Crunch [after the brand of cereals which gave out this great tool first], discovered that the whistle could be easily modified to emit a tone at 2600 hertz - the frequency used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready and available to route a new call. This would effectively disconnect the end of the trunk, allowing the still connected side to enter the operator mode. The experiment of Captain Crunch lead to huge material expenses of sustaining the unbilled phone calls, the redesign of the line protocols and the accelerated equipment replacement. Though they could no longer serve practical use, the Cap'n Crunch whistles did become valued collector's items.

But, it would be a meaningless effort to try to re-tell all the stories from the room 101, from the beginning to the end. To the curious readers I'd rather recommend to visit the website, which is offering an insightful look into the history of hacking... and beyond. In brief, the other four examples were hacks in the "copyright law" [by Richard Stallman, famous creator of GNU GPL] – this one considered by Marcell to be “the greatest hack of all, and the reason why we made System Hack at the first place”, then "corporate bio-engineering" [project Superweed Kit 1.0 by Heath Bounting], "hardware locking" [by Michael Steil, "Linux on Xbox"] and "system of protection" [Anonymous - CD protection kit (marker/shift key)].

Now, I will just quickly go trough some points of the discussion that succeeded the story telling...

Speaking about "institutional critique", Tom made the parallel between the choice of the hotel room as the place of presenting 'artifacts' and the tradition of apartment art in the 60s and 70s. Historical fleeing from institutionalized spaces for showing art at that time represented the act of rebel against canonization of history of art and the national museums as representatives of the power of the welfare state. System Hack simply repeated the historical gesture against the institutions and the ways in which they reflect social relations today. Although the parallel with the apartment art practices was really attractive, I had the problem with the clear division of what is "inside" and what is "outside" of the institution. My colleague from Prelom Dusan Grlja and I have recently discussed this issue and we tended to problematize the notion of institution as the building which one can simply leave and produce the critique through this very gesture. Institutional logic today is reproduced on the level of subject [with the striking parallel between the activity of free cultural worker and small entrepreneur] and it is quite problematic to define the space of autonomous action as the simple "outside". Therefore, I suggested to shift the focus to the critique of the enclosure of the fields of "new media" and "contemporary art" and to discuss the positions of the privileged owners of the cultural capital today. My standpoint was that the means of production today are based on a certain knowledge, 'to - know - how - to - do', which is still not democratized, despite all the stories about democratization of knowledge through the alternative use of technology. I mentioned famous sentence by Arthur C. Clarke, that '50% of the humankind haven't made it’s first phone call yet'. The question that comes out of that constatation is whether all those "hacks", despite their obvious critical contribution, still relate to the limited realm of educated users and, as the final consequence, verify the logic of enclosure of "the new media field". Marcel passionately jumped into discussion and 'tagged' my comment as the usual radical leftist bullshitting. He claimed that the Internet activism, as for a difference of contemporary art and critical theory, is one of the most important sources of progressive social changes today, because it's contribution is real and measurable. He mentioned bit-torrent protocol as the eclatant example. Although torrents made my life [I'm one of the movie addicts and great admirer of the representation of the 'fair use' of data transfer during the protocol of file sharing] I wanted to discuss something else, which is beyond micro-politics, but I was not persistent enough to continue with the arguments.

Tom and Marcel invited the crowd to continue the discussion in the cafe and I welcomed the initiative from the ultimately selfish reasons ... I was thinking about a glass of vine for some time already. Anyhow, the last point of my participation in the 'exhibition experience' had to do with the micro-politics. On my way out I said hi to the young architect Dubravka Sekulic who was sitting in the front of the open door of the show-room 101 and knitting the wool hat over entire session with 100% of dedication. This side-effect of micro-performance could have been considered as the girl hack into the predominantly boyish fascination with the technology. Wool hat looked good. It was cold outside.