Draft:Context Hacking

Context hacking is a term used in media art, hacker culture and cultural theory to describe artistic and activist interventions that apply concepts from hacking to social, cultural, institutional and media environments. The term has been closely associated with the work of Austrian artist Johannes Grenzfurthner and the art and theory group monochrom. It has since been taken up in media studies, art theory, game studies, robotics research and cultural theory.^[1][2][3]

Context hacking treats social and institutional contexts as rule-bound systems whose conventions, interfaces and power relations can be analysed, modified or repurposed. It overlaps with practices such as culture jamming, guerrilla communication, tactical media, institutional critique and urban interventionism, while placing particular emphasis on hacker culture and net culture. The concept was consolidated in the 2013 anthology Context Hacking: How to Mess with Art, Media, Law and the Market.^[4][5]

Origins and development

The phrase was used in connection with monochrom by the mid-2000s. A 2004 monochrom blog archive and later publications included "context hacking" in a self-description of the group.^[6][7] In July 2006, the Toronto art institution Mercer Union described monochrom as "a collective, operating worldwide, that deals with technology, art, context hacking and philosophy".^[8] A similar description appeared in the programme for HOPE Number Six in New York in July 2006^[9] and a 2007 Wired post by Bruce Sterling and V. Vale.^[10]

A 2010 article by Jayme Spinks in The Senses and Society described monochrom's development from its earlier print and zine culture into a broader practice involving technology, art, political hacks, media and context hacking.^[11] By 2008, the term had also become the title of public lectures by Grenzfurthner. The programme for O'Reilly ETech 2008 listed Grenzfurthner's talk "Context Hacking: Some Examples of How to Mess with Art, the Media System, Law and the Market" for 5 March 2008 in San Diego.^[12] In 2011, digital rights activist Cory Doctorow described Grenzfurthner's TEDxVienna presentation as a talk on "context hacking".^[13]

In 2013, the anthology Context Hacking: How to Mess with Art, Media, Law and the Market was published by edition mono/monochrom in Vienna.^[4] Edited by Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Frank Apunkt Schneider, the volume brought together essays and artistic examples around the term and consolidated earlier uses of context hacking in talks, self-descriptions and monochrom's artistic practice.^[14] The media-art magazine Neural reviewed the volume as a publication that restated twenty years of monochrom's activity across different cultural and artistic contexts and situated the group within a communication-guerrilla background.^[5]

Later sources attributed the concept to Grenzfurthner; in 2016, Boing Boing described him as having coined it.^[15]

Concept

The term "context hacking" is defined in the title essay of the 2013 anthology Context Hacking: How to Mess with Art, Media, Law and the Market.^[14] The essay, written by Frank Apunkt Schneider, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Günther Friesinger, forms a central theoretical part of the book of the same name and sets out the concept as a transfer of hacker methods to social, artistic and institutional environments. In this usage, "hacking" refers less to unauthorized access to computer systems than to opening, analysing, modifying and repurposing existing structures. The essay argues that artistic production is always embedded in an "art context": a network of economic, institutional, historical and social relations that shapes how artworks are produced, perceived and valued.

The essay links the concept to earlier debates around institutional critique and contextual art. It argues that art is not autonomous from its conditions of production, but is situated within social subsystems such as the art market, funding structures, subcultures, media scenes and political environments. Drawing on hacker culture, it describes hacking as a practical critique of technology and alienation: a process of gaining access to closed systems, understanding their construction and modifying them rather than merely using them according to predefined interfaces. Context hacking transfers this model to "social artifacts". Spaces, scenes, subcultures, media formats, legal norms and political practices are described metaphorically as systems with source code, programs, user interfaces and terms of use.

The concept is closely related to guerrilla communication, culture jamming, urban hacking and tactical media. The essay explicitly compares context hacking with guerrilla communication, urban hacking, culture jamming and cultural hacking, all of which use representations, identities, alienation and over-identification as starting points for political intervention. In these practices, an intervention does not simply oppose a given narrative from outside, but enters the codes of a context, imitates its forms and exploits its expectations. The essay cites The Yes Men as an example of this strategy, because their actions imitate the language, dress codes and authority structures of corporate and political power in order to produce disruptive effects from within.

What distinguishes context hacking within this field is its emphasis on moving between contexts rather than identifying with a single medium, scene or political style. The essay describes this as "context hopping" and "context bending": artistic, political, technological and subcultural frameworks are treated as tools that can be entered, left, combined or strategically misused. Context hacking is therefore presented not only as a disruptive method, but also as a way of overcoming the isolation of niches and reconnecting fields such as art, activism, hacker culture and counterculture.

In practical terms, context hacking has been associated with choosing the appropriate medium or framework for an intervention, understanding the context in which one operates, and producing creative short circuits within it. Grenzfurthner has linked this use of hacking to the older MIT sense of a hack as a student prank, rather than only to later meanings of computer intrusion.^[16][17] Programme and symposium texts have associated context hacking with unconventional communication, interventions in established communication processes, estrangement, over-identification, storytelling and the play with representations and identities.^[12][18][19] Jean Peters describes Grenzfurthner as a "Kontext-Hacker", discussing his 2005 intervention at a far-right demonstration in Bavaria as an example of tactical over-identification and mimicry.^[20]

Reception and applications

The term has been used in media studies, art theory, game studies, robotics research, cultural theory and event research. It has also appeared in cultural histories of hacking alongside urban hacking as a form of social or political protest.^[21]

In art and media contexts, context hacking has been associated with intervention, communication guerrilla, humour, play, performance and networked cultural production.^[22][23][24] The Gap connected monochrom's retrospective practice to communication guerrilla and context hacking, while Ulrike Bergermann discusses the term as part of a film- and gender-studies analysis of gender identity and digital culture.^[25][26]

See also

• Art intervention
• Culture jamming
• Guerrilla communication
• Hacker culture
• Institutional critique
• New media art
• Tactical media
• Urban interventionism

References

Further reading

• Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Frank Apunkt Schneider, eds. Context Hacking: How to Mess with Art, Media, Law and the Market. Vienna: edition mono/monochrom, 2013. ISBN 9783902796134.
• Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner and Thomas Ballhausen, eds. Urban Hacking: Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity. Bielefeld: transcript, 2010. ISBN 9783837615364.