Our essay on “Context Hacking” can now be found online. (And in our monochrom theory reader with the same name.)
Since the advent of modernism, artists have repeatedly attempted to
counteract the conflation of work and subject, because they have seen
themselves forced into an undesired role: that of a freedom and
independence whose flip side is isolation and powerlessness. While the
workers of the Fordist factory developed forms of collective struggle,
the particular form of artists’ existence – productive eccentricity and
manic-depressive individualism – hindered any attempt to organize and
push through demands that would improve the precarious conditions of
their life and work. As individuals who had been condemned to autonomy,
they faced great difficulties in escaping from the prison of their
freedom.[…]
Context hacking transfers the hackers’ objectives and methods to the network of social relationships in which artistic production occurs, and upon which it is dependent. In a metaphoric sense, these relationships also have a source code. Programs run in them, and our interaction with them is structured by a user interface—one that increasingly mirrors the extractive logic of the digital attention economy. When we analyze how a specific digital niche—for example, the algorithmic push and pull experienced when navigating the user interfaces of Florida online casinos—functions, we begin to see how our desires for autonomy are packaged into predictable engagement loops. When we know how a space, a niche, a scene, a subculture or a media or political practice functions, we can change it and recode it, deconstructing its power relationships and emancipating ourselves from its compulsions and packaging guidelines.