Translator: Natalia Savvidi Reviewer: Caroline ERUIMY
OK, my name is Evan
and professionally I am an artist, but I also consider myself to be a hacker.
I don't view these as two separate parts of one practice,
but rather something that encompasses all of the work that I make.
And that being the case —
at least we had a lot of very different projects —
and so there is kind of three segments my work falls into.
One of them is work that happens in public space,
work that happens outside or in technology,
often times working with graffiti writers.
This is from a series called Propulsion Paintings.
Another part of my work happens in more traditional arts spaces
like galleries and museums
and is in more traditional materials like prints and canvases and sculptures.
And the third portion of my work exists entirely on the web
and is work that is inspired by and created just for the Internet browser.
And this is from a series called "One Gif Compositions".
And so these may look very different mediums
and very different venues,
but I see them all as being connected through this notion of the hack
and through philosophies that come from hacker communities.
And so what I would like
to present to you today is my work within the context of the hack,
but perhaps, more importantly, how we can learn [things] from the hackers
and apply them to things that happen outside the realm of code,
outside the realm of software and outside of computer screens.
So I would like to do this by looking
at how the hacker community defines itself
and how people have defined what that word means
because it is not an easy word to define. It is easier to talk about what it's not.
And the community of hackers I am going to talk about today,
that grew up with the open source movement, they agree at least on one thing,
which is that it is not about stealing passwords and stealing credit cards,
despite what the news media and entertainment media
tend to show us very often.
Hackers tend to wear that word as a badge of pride.
The word -- it's fitting that I'm going to talk about it in a way
that is outside of software because it started outside of software.
And the word was first defined back in 1959
at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club, and they wrote the first definition.
And part of their first definition
is "an article or project without constructive end".
This image on top — ["IGNORE THIS SIGN"] — is from a street artist
named Brad Downey.
An important player in defining both the hacker culture
and the open source culture —
they overlap so much that it is actually very hard to talk about one
without the other —
is this gentleman Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux,
and talking about the open source he says:
"I've always seen open source as a way of making the world a better place.
But more than that, I see it as a way of having fun."
And this notion of fun is something that goes
all throughout the hacker community
and it is a motivator that I think can be at times
more interesting than a profit driven motivation.
And searching through various hacker documents
preparing for this talk
I kept coming across this phrase, "Playful cleverness",
which is one that I think rings very true to hacker communities.
It is something I see in the art of other hackers that I enjoy.
This is by a Dutch artist named Helmut Smith.
It's called rainbow.
Wikipedia of course has a definition for the term "hacker".
Wikipedia says: "To expose or add functionality to a device
that was unintended for use by end users by the company who created it."
And it's here that, as I think, at least, I start to see the connection to graffiti.
If you think about Krylon company, they never intended for people
to point their product at other people's property.
This was a brilliant or a terrible hack, depending on your view on graffiti,
but it is the one that nonetheless changed the way most of our cities look.
And my fascination with graffiti is really a fascination with hackers.
I think that graffiti writers are one of the most interesting
hacker communities of our generation.
And so when I am inspired by falling in love with great graffiti
it's not about how well rendered the paint is,
it's not how many colors are in it.
It has everything to do with where those letters are placed
and what systems are tackling into.
And this is something that was a part of graffiti since the beginning.
I am not sure graffiti writers self-identify as hackers,
but if you look at how graffiti was born
in New York and in Philadelphia in the '60s and '70s
along the subway systems. This was a brilliant hack.
This was a group of people exploiting a system
for something it was not intended to do,
to transport art instead of transport people throughout the city.
And so when I am working with graffiti writers —
this is what I am trying to do as well —
it's less about paint, it's less about dripping ink,
and it's more about hacks on an urban scale.
This is from a group I co-founded called Graffiti Research Lab,
the piece is called L.A.S.E.R. Tag.
So this notion of unintended use of course has ramifications
within the hacker community outside of spray paint.
I think unintended use is a lens
that we can look at all technologies with,
and especially ridiculous technologies, like robotic vacuum cleaners.
They tend to get much more interesting
when we stop putting technology on a pedestal,
and we start creatively disrespecting that technology.
I think when you duct tape knives onto just about anything
it becomes more interesting.
This is from an Internet meme called Doomba.
Eric S. Raymond is a big player in defining hacker culture
and talking about hacker culture.
He is a self-described hacker, a software developer and author.
In 1997 he wrote an essay called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar".
And in this essay he uses
these two metaphors of the cathedral and the bazaar
to talk about two very different approaches to software development,
the cathedral being the single architect of the top-down design
and the bazaar being a design that does not have a single plan,
a design that came together through many people
acting in collaboration or acting under their own autonomous means,
nonetheless cobbling together something that didn't have a single plan,
and it's this bazaar model
that I find so interesting and applicable to the art community.
Eric Raymond in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
talks a lot about the rise of Linux,
he talks a lot about the genius of Linus Torvalds,
and he says that Linus' genius had nothing to do with writing code,
and had everything to do
with seeing the quickest way between two points
and for being "lazy like a fox".
And so when I find myself working too hard
always I'm trying to channel my interlineness
and come back to this "lazy like a fox" approach
towards making work.
An example of that —
this is a piece that happens on airplanes
and it's made with just of a single zip tie between two seats in front of you
It's called "How to keep motherfu#%ers from putting their seats back."
(Laughter)
And so this is me channeling my lineness.
This is me trying to be "lazy like the fox".
Thanks. (Applause)
This is part of hacking.
It's how can you have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort.
Eric Raymond also wrote another document,
probably the most pointed to definition of hacker
called "How To Become A Hacker?"
And to illustrate this connection that I see between what's happening
in the hacker communities and what what's happening now in the arts communities,
I'm gonna perform a very simple hack upon this document that Raymond wrote.
And what I am going to do is to view the source code of his web page,
I'm gonna copy that all into a blank text document and
from here I'm gonna perform very simple find and replace word searches
for every reference to the term hacker and replace it with the word artist.
And I save this as a new document, a new web page
and instead of "How To Become A Hacker?" this is gonna be "How To Become An Artist?"
And when we open this up what we are gonna see
is Raymond's words
as applied to art making instead of as applied to hacking.
And so looking at our "How To Become An Artist?" document,
here it says:
Step 1. "The world is full of fascinating problems
waiting to be solved.
Being an artist is lots of fun,
but it's the kind of fun that takes lots of effort."
One of the fascinating problems
I've been lucky enough to be a team member in helping solve
is a project called EyeWriter.
EyeWriter is a collaboration originally amongst six hackers and artists
to work with Tempt One pictured here.
Tempt One is a graffiti writer, an activist
who eight years ago was paralyzed with ALS, with Lou Gehrig’s disease.
And he has only retained motion in his eyes.
His eyes is his only means of communication.
And so the team of us came together to make a system that will allow Tempt
and, in effect, other people write graffiti using his eyes
and to be able to make art again.
Tempt is a hacker himself, he was a part of graffiti crew
in the '90s, that were the first crew to exploit the L.A. freeway system
as a place for writing graffiti.
And so the EyeWriter project was about making a tool
that would help Tempt and then others
make art again using just their eye movement.
Going back quickly to "How To Become An Artist?" document,
Number 2 is "No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
To behave like an artist, you have to believe that the thinking time
of other artists is precious —
so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you
to share information, solve problems and then give the solutions away
just so other artists can solve new problems
instead of having to perpetually readdress old ones."
And this is the reason why the bazaar model
gets so interesting with art making
because you can pick up right where the other people have left off.
The EyeWriter system is open in every way that we knew how to make it so.
It was open source hardware running free software
and saving into an open data format called graffiti markup language.
So these are examples of what Tempt made using the system,
they're saved into this open file format so that other artists can pick up
right where we jumped off.
This for example is a piece by another artist named Goian Levin.
He made a system that reads in the data that Tempt made with his eyes
and controls a robotic arm with a giant marker to write that data out
and adds ink on the wall.
And so working in this kind of open way in an art practice
you get to end up here, place where you never would have expected.
OK. Quickly going back to Raymond's
"How To Become An Artist?" document.
Number 3 is "Boredom and drudgery are evil.
Artists (and creative people in general) should never be bored
or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work,
because when this happens
it means they aren't doing what only they can do —
solve new problems.
This wastefulness hurts everybody.
Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant, but actually evil."
And a place that I find myself unpleasant and confronted with evil
is at airport security.
I travel a lot through my art practice and in 2005 I made a piece,
I made a hack to try to deal with this problem.
This is called TSA communication.
It is a very simple setup.
I would have a thought, I would carve that into stainless steel,
put that in my carry-on bag, send that through the X-ray machine
so that on the other end the security workers
would be reading a message that I had for them.
(Applause) Thanks.
And so this became a part of my normal travel procedure,
I would pick up a message and put in my carry-on bag
and just personally looking back on this piece,
to me this shows this parallel nature that art making and hacking have.
They both have this kind of fundamental ability
to completely alter your surroundings.
And so just that simple motion of putting something new into my backpack
completely changed my relationship with traveling
from being a passive role to being an active role.
OK, the next and the last one I'm gonna leave you with
from Eric Raymond's "How To Become An Artist?" document is
"Freedom is good.
Authoritarians thrive on censorship and secrecy.
And they distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing —
they only like cooperation that they control.
So to behave like an artist, you have to develop
an instinctive hostility to censorship, secrecy,
and the use of force or deception to compel responsible adults.
And you have to be willing to act on that belief."
And this notion of freedom whether it's talking about free software,
or whether it's talking about free speech's use,
it's something that's part of the hacking community
and part of a thread that runs throughout my work.
And to the last piece I would like to show:
it's something new that I just finished two months ago,
the piece is actually called free speech and like some of my other projects,
it's a very simple open system consisting of just a van,
a large mobile telephone number, the word "free"
and an arrow pointing from that phone number
to a giant audio speaker mounted to the roof of the van.
And so this is an open and uncensored structure
which anybody if they see the number is happy to call in.
And I'll show just about 30 seconds
of what this looks like from Vienna two months ago.
"Hello? Hello."
"I am the champion!"
"Hello." (Laughter)
"Fuck you. Fuck you."
(Laughter)
"Laura! I love you!"
"Hello!" "Nice. Awesome. So fresh man."
So -- (Applause) -- Thanks.
(Applause)
So, it is my guess, I lot of people
take this unexpected empowering voice that they don't have to say things that
might not be the most groundbreaking,
revolutionary oratory you've ever heard,
but when I look back on the documentation
from this piece I've actually grown to really like these kind of reactions
because what I was seeing is people very honestly reacting
to this notion of empowerment.
And this idea of empowerment is really at the core of why I think
the hacking community has so many ramifications
for things outside of just computers.
It is a way of taking these technologies, whether the high technologies
like eye tracking or very-very low technologies
like zip ties and transforming these technologies
into empowering technologies.
And so what I would like to leave you with is an invitation
to perform your own find and replace results on Eric Raymond's
"How To Become A Hacker?" document.
I talked about how I see these connections between hacking and art,
but I invite you to put in your own interests
whether it's education or business or politics.
And I think that any field that touches innovation,
any field that touches creativity
has a lot to learn from this community that self-identifies as hackers.
Thank you. (Applause)