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Hacker artist

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File:Bm2005.jpg
Example of hacker art: Cubatron lights

A hacker artist is an artist creating art through hacking, by using technology as their artistic medium.

Description

Author Larry Polansky states: "Technology and art are inextricably related. Many musicians, video artists, graphic artists, and even poets who work with technology – whether designing it or using it – consider themselves to be part of the 'hacker comunity.' Computer artists, like non-art hackers, often find themselves on society’s fringes, developing strange, innovative uses of existing technology. There is an empathetic relationship between those, for example, who design experimental music software and hackers who write communications freeware." [1]

Another description is offered by Jenny Marketou: "Hacker artists operate as culture hackers who manipulate existing techno-semiotic structures towards a different end, to get inside cultural systems on the net and make them do things they were never intended to do." [2]

Perhaps the earliest usage of the term was on December 4, 1995, on Art.Net, when hacker artists were invited to join Art.Net's artist community, by hacker artist and Art.Net webmaster Lile Elam.

Hacker artists do not necessarily break into other computer systems. Such folks who take advantage of other computer systems and their weaknesses are often called "crackers". Many people inadvertently confuse the terms.

Examples

Many hacker artists publish on Art.Net's hacker studios section. Some hacker artists create art by writing computer code; others by developing hardware. And some hacker artists create art by just using pre-written software tools such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP.

A successful software and hardware hacker artist is Mark Lottor (mkl), who has created the 3-D light art projects, the Cubatron, and the Big Round Cubatron. This art is made using computer technology, with specially designed circuit boards and programming for chips to manipulate the LED lights.

Don Hopkins is another software hacker artist well-known for his artistic cellular automata. This art is created by a cellular automata computer program that generates objects which randomly bump into each other which in return creates more objects and designs, similar to a lava lamp, except that the parts change color and form through interaction. Says Hopkins, "Cellular automata are simple rules that are applied to a grid of cells, or the pixel values of an image. The same rule is applied to every cell, to determine its next state, based on the previous state of that cell and its neighboring cells. There are many interesting cellular automata rules, and they all look very different, with amazing animated dynamic effects. 'Life' is a widely known cellular automata rule, but many other lesser known rules are much more interesting!"

References

  1. ^ "Singing Together, Hacking Together, Plundering Together," by Larry Polansky http://www.the-open-space.org/osonline/polansky/singing.html
  2. ^ "Hacking Seductions as Art" by Cornelia Sollfrank http://www.thing.net/~jmarketo/interviews/cornelia.shtml

Articles Referencing "Hacker Artists"

Hacker Art Projects

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