Appropriation and the Hack: New Forms of Production

‘Transitoriness vs. permanence: creative practices in the era of hyper-mobility’.

My art practice is hybrid, involving the production of works that are immaterial/online and material/physical. This hybridity necessitates testing the notion of ‘mobilised sites’ where work is shown (sometimes simultaneously) in both online and material spaces. This process for the dissemination of the work also interrogates how the work might be received, read or used and the difference in audiences for each site.

Hybridity is also present in the methods of production where a symbiotic co-authorship exists between (myself as) author and search engines as ‘co-authors’. The process of digital appropriation from the Internet and also the digital presentation of the work references McKenzie Wark’s theories of the ‘hack’: "In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers, hacking the new out of the old". (Wark, 2004, s.004)