Talk presented at TEDxVienna, November 2010.
The term “context hacking” - like its older mimetic sibling “communication guerrilla” - refers to unconventional forms of communication and/or intervention in more conventional processes of communication. Context hacking is a specific style of political action drawing from a watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of power, turning these into the starting point for subversive interventions. It’s a strategy of playing with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification. But a fundamental question remains: is it still possible to subvert? Or are we all stuck in an endless late-capitalist cycle of revolt and assimilation?
Johannes Grenzfurthner will present a project by monochrom, a worldwide operating collective from Vienna dealing with technology, art, and philosophy.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder of monochrom, an internationally acting art and theory group. He holds a professorship for art theory and art practice at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz, Austria. He is head of the “Arse Elektronika” festival in San Francisco, host of “Roboexotica” (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics, Vienna and San Francisco), and co-curates the Paraflows Symposium in Vienna. He gave talks at SXSWi, O’Reilly ETech, FooCamp, Maker Faire, HOPE, Chaos Communication Congress, Google (Tech Talks), ROFLCon, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, Influencers or the Neoteny Camp Singapore. He and his projects have been featured in New York Times, Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Reuters, Slashdot, Boing Boing, LA Times, NPR, ZDF, Gizmodo, Wired, Süddeutsche Zeitung, CNet or the Toronto Star.
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