Reading the comments in Amanda’s post has me thinking about the line separating the term “hacking” from other words we perhaps use more commonly: “altering,” “adjusting,” “re-appropriating,” ”translating,” “transporting,” “transforming,” maybe even “evolving.” Inasmuch as we’ve really had time to converse as a community thus far, we’ve seemed to want to use these aforementioned terms more-or-less interchangeably. And though I suppose “hacking” is often used in a more pejorative sense than are the synonymous(?) terms we seem to keep skirting around–or at least the term carries with it a slightly more negative connotation, even if for no other reason than its association with the fearful, unknowable world of modern technology–I’m left thinking, is there something more that separates this term from the others, something beyond its association with computers?

I admittedly know or understand very little (read: nothing at all) about the computer hacking world, so I’ll have to defer some of my thinking on this until Phil, Amanda, and others of you educate me on it, but for whatever reason it seems important to me now to clarify our definition in its original context (i.e. computers) some if we aim to apply it to other technologies (e.g. books). If “hacking” means more than simply “tinkering with,” that will mean one thing for us; if “hacking” only means “tinkering with,” then that will require us to use some adjectives to describe the intentions (good, or bad, or simply curious) of respective hacking processes.

Note: Something I had forgotten but feel obligated to recognize–Phil had this to say about hacking/altering:

“It’s worth more thought than I can devote to it for the moment, but it’s certainly a practice of appropriation. In our time the hacker ethos of making technology one’s own comes to us by many paths…To hack a book–to take a first hack at it–could be to come to fluency within the system of book-making, to appropriate the received technology of book production and printing for one’s own unique artistic vision, to appropriate past books, [etc.]“

I’d still like to delve into this a bit more, but I’m sure it’s something we’ll get around to on Thursday.

In the meantime, here’s something fun to look at:

Dario Robleto: "You have to make the assumption that alteration is a constructive act, not a destructive one, and it’s the opposite of most of our impulses."

Guernica magazine recently featured an interview with Dario Robleto–one of my favorite visual artists and one of the more interesting and versatile thinking-people I’ve come across (as you’ll see in the interview)–in which Robleto talks about using ‘dead’ objects as material for ‘new,’ ‘living’ artwork. Some examples (quoting Guernica’s Rebecca Bates):

Mammoth hair plucked from receding glaciers is braided into flowers in the Victorian tradition (“Some Longings Survive Death”); album covers of live performances of dead musicians are used to make stage lights (“Candles Un-burn, Suns Un-shine, Death Un-dies”); cotton and soldiers’ letters to their wives become pulp for new paper used in wreaths (“Defiant Gardens”)…human hand bones are set in a circle with the 50,000-year-old claws of extinct cave bears

…and all of this to “tur[n] the original materials into something else, something almost unrecognizable, and in doing so ignit[e] a conversation about how we wrestle with grief, and how turning that grief into something tangible may or may not be a comfort.”

Without pulling too much more from the interview itself (go check it out), I’ll leave you with this gem of a selection for now. Maybe we can have some sort of conversation on whether Robleto is “hacking” art, “altering” his materials, or something else altogether, in the comments.

Guernica: The materials you use often take on a new form. For example, you’re no longer able to listen to the pulled tape of the earliest audio recording of time, so I’m wondering if you find there’s a sense of destruction inherent in the act preservation?

Dario Robleto: I understand that this could be the interpretation. But if you want to really understand what I’m doing, I ask the viewer to make a leap, to not immediately understand alteration as destruction. You have to make the assumption that alteration is a constructive act, not a destructive one, and it’s the opposite of most of our impulses. It’s like what I was saying about the Victorians and us understanding past ways of thinking through a modern point of view, which we can’t help. That’s the moment we live in, but it’s not the only way. To understand something changing form as a destructive act is a very modern, Western gut reaction to things, and I get it. But what I’m suggesting is nothing radical, this notion of things constantly changing, and that the change is not inherently destructive. Things change, our bodies change, everything’s changing, and to me that philosophy’s no different with these materials. With audiotape or the paper or any number of things I use, what is initiated by the alteration is the art. The artwork, the discussion around it, the fact that we’re talking now—all these things that are set in motion are part of the constructive nature of alteration. It’s never a violent destructive act; to me it’s always a respectful, constructive, pushing-the-story-forward act.

*Dario Robleto has a website at: http://www.acmelosangeles.com/artists/dario-robleto/

“When losing a phone feels like losing a piece of your soul, you’ve become a cyborg.” –Jad Abumrad

I’m thinking of my “favorite aspect of technology” in terms of later class discussion and the syllabus in general, primarily the definition of technology—whether it must be utilitarian and whether it can have agency.

It seems to me that the “glitches” I enjoy might appeal to me because they make the machine feel fallible and therefore human. Mixing up people’s pictures, mis-guessing the next word—those are things I might do. And it’s pretty human to sympathize with a consciousness that feels to be “like me.” And there it is–these mistakes make me recognize technology as a consciousness. And it makes me giggle! Humor after all, seems to be a mix of that which is delightful and that which is terrifying. It’s like the uncanny. The familiar and the unfamiliar, in the same space. The shiver, or laugh, seems to emanate from the inability to understand which one is covering the other—which is the real and which is the costume. Is the technological consciousness friendly and familiar? Or is it taking over? (Could the takeover be parental or for our own good, as suggested by Brautigan? I feel the shiver/giggle again at that idea, which seems to repeat the same uncanny trick.)

And now that Freud is brought into my ramblings, I can talk about the other effect of those charmingly frightening glitches. Regarding a human consciousness, we tend to believe that slip-ups reveal truth. Whether we learned the technique directly from Freud, from popular culture’s appropriation of his ideas, or whether the instinct is much older than either, we tend to watch for the subconscious to poke through and reveal the great truth of who we are. In this way, a computer glitch becomes the technological subconscious poking out at me.

I mentioned in class that I was delighted by the way my iPhone mixes up my friend’s pictures. It’s funny because it’s silly. It’s funny because it brings technology down to a human level. And it’s terrifying because it brings human beings down to the level of the machine. This happens because of the recognition of consciousness in what I want to be only a tool. (I see the errors as more evidence of human-like consciousness, by the way, than a computer’s common trick of, say, computing.)

In the particular glitch I mentioned, the slip up goes further. It tells me that the computer can’t tell people apart. It mixes us up! We are numbers or objects to the brain that we have built. So as I recognize a frightening humanity in the machine, I know that it does not recognize mine.

Hi all,

Just thought I’d share my mental reflex to  Brautigan, which was, naturally, a vision of Keanu Reeves dripping with goo in The Matrix. (Hope this isn’t a spoiler!)

After some thought, there do seem to be a few fairly sturdy justifications of this connection…the Machines’ human harvest fields seem to align with the poem’s “cybernetic meadow” (line 3), and collectively they serve as a pessimistic manifestation of a “cybernetic ecology” (line 19).  Such an eco(techno?)system would certainly, in a sense, make us humans “free of our labors” (line 20)…to such an extent, in fact, that the user becomes the tool.

It is this sort of dark undertone that, as I read it, pervades the poem. But, maybe there is an argument that Brautigan’s speaker is a genuine optimist?

Cheers,

Jen

This is the course website for Professor Neil Fraistat’s Spring 2012 Technoromanticism seminar (English 738T).