Welcome to Imogen Clendinning's guest lecture on
HACKING and net.art in the early 2000s

In today's class we will review last week's materials concerning
the birth of net.art in 1995. We will then analyze net.art
and new media artworks from the early 2000s, discuss the
historical and political context in which these works were
created, and then discuss the reading for this week, an
excerpt from McKenzie Wark's incomparable "A Hacker Manifesto."

Learning Outcomes:

* Describe the shift in net.art practice from the late 90s to the mid 2000s, and dissect net.art works from 2001-2005

* Discuss the political motivations of the
artist-hacker and apply these concepts to the analysis
of Internet Art

* Practice the hacker-artist methodology in your own web use

Today we will be discussing the evolution from the net.art as tinkerer or community organizer to their move activist, political evolution of net artist-hacker in the early 2000s.

But first... a brief overview of last week's class on the birth of
net.art.

In December 1995, the term net.art was coined when artist Vuk Cosic
accidentally glitched software by opening an anonymous email, resulting in a digital file of alphanumeric randomized symbols.
Cosic couldn't make out any words or symbols other that the
phrase 'net.art' and so the term was born ("Web Work: A History of Net Art," Rachel Greene). In the following years this term would come to describe all manner of artworks made online, also known as the 'born-digital.' The medium of net.art was defined by the strategic misuse of Internet technology, producing political interventions, critique tinged with humour or interactive hypertext storytelling (last week we discussed Olia Lialina's "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War).

The aesthetic qualities of net.art, as you will see throughout the course, fluctuate in accordance with the evolution of The Web. The artworks we looked at last week reflect the capacities of Web 1.0 in the late 90s, while the works we discuss today will vary slightly, reflecting the look of the Web in the early 2000s. It should also be noted here that for many net artists, aesthetics was not their primary concern. An artwork was intended to fluctuate as Internet technology developed, and so many net.artworks made in the early 2000s can not be experienced in their original format today, they are altered by their current context within the contemporary virtual space.

*

One vital characteristic of the net.art was the community itself; Internet artists formed virtual communities through email chains and online forums. In the first phases of the net.art movement, these online discussions allowed artists to dialogue with one another outside of art institutions ("Web Work: A History of Net Art," Rachel Greene). And so, the basis of net.art is defined by both the subversion of Internet technology, as well as, building grassroots communities online.

Today we will look at how these core features of net.art practice inevitably led Internet artists to develop hacking methodologies in their creative works. We will look at the works of three "artist-hackers" working in 2000-2010, and also review McKenzie Wark's "A Hacker Manifesto," in order to investigate the political motivations of the artist-hacker.

Screenshot of "hacking.art" webpage

Screenshot of "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War" Olia Lialina, 1996. curtesy of Net Art Anthology.

"Super Mario Clouds,"
Cory Arcangel, 2002.
Image curtesy of the
Whitney Museum of American Art.

We will begin by looking at Cory Arcangel’s new media work, “Super Mario Clouds,” from 2002. A textbook example of the artist-hacker here, Arcangel’s work ‘hacks’ a game cartridge of Super Mario Brothers, a popular Nintendo game released in 1985. Arcangel tweaks the code of the original game, removing all sound and visual components except the sky and clouds from the original game. Importantly, the work was intended to be displayed on the web alongside an online tutorial teaching users how to hack their gaming systems. This work was first shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2002, in a sense removing the artwork from its intended environment.

I think this piece is vital to our discussion today, to situate us within the world of the net artist/in this time period. Whereas in the late 90s net artists and new media artists were meeting in online forums and producing groundbreaking works outside of museums and galleries, now, Arcangel and others were being invited into the Western canon. This work was premiered at the Whitney Biennial (a world known exhibition of contemporary American art), and in that same year ten net artists were featured in the biennial. In other words, by the early 2000s, net.art had gone mainstream, (yikes!).

Screenshot of Mary Flanagan's "[collection]," 2001. Image curtesy of artist's website.

Mackenzie Wark defines the hacker as, “someone who turns information— of any kind— into intellectual property. Hence, programmers can be hackers, but so too can scientists, artists, writers, designers, and so on,”

(Wark, interviewed by Melissa Gregg)

Screenshot of Keith and Mendi Obadike's "Blackness for Sale," 2001.
Image curtesy of Net Art Anthology.

This section of the lecture would include an analysis of Obadike's piece. We would think about the hack as a political intervention, touching on Wark's manifesto and also look at the Black net.art community in the early 2000s.

THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN 


DIGITAL ART // HACKING

ACTIVISM //

NET.ART

A Hacker Manifesto | Review

"A Hacker Manifesto" was published in 2004 by Harvard University Press. This short book borrows its epigrammic style from Guy Debord's "Society and the Spectacle," the text also activates Marxism through the addition of a 'hacker class,' and 'vectorial class.' Wark dreams of the utopian potentials of the 'hacker class' to rise up and control by hacking, through the creation of new information and perceptions. For Wark, all information is code; the 'abstraction' she refers to is the doubling of an object or concept in the virtual space. The abstraction of information and concepts allows the hacker class to alter the information, creating new relations. In this sense Wark suggests that a hack can be achieved through art, music, science or other activations of information.

The 'vectorial class,' described by Wark are those who seek to commodify information. The vectorial class are the opposition to the hacker's utopian dream of free information. They are named the vectorial class due to their control of vectors (pathways where information flows). They represent corporate interest, specifically technology corporations, who own the means of production. The vectorial class conceptualize information as a resource, and they seek to dispossess hackers (creators) of their intellectual property (creative output/art/information etc).

DIGITAL AUTONOMY

ACTIVISM

INFORMATION
AS COMMODITY

HACK

VECTORIAL 
CLASS

The Museum

First, divide into groups of two *or work individually if you prefer*. Together, discuss the artworks from class today along with the assigned excerpt from Wark's "A Hacker Manifesto." How do these artworks reflect Wark's description of the "hacker," the "vectorial class," and the concept of "information as capitol"?

Next, together write a short description of your collaborative analysis, and add it to the digital mind-map below. You may also write on paper and share this with the class if you do not have a laptop or are unable to write directly on hotglue.

QUESTIONS TO GET YOU STARTED:


1. How does this artwork disrupt your pre-existing relationship to the Internet?

2. Is the 'hack' an artist method or a political intervention? Discuss.

3. What are the implications of a purposeful malfunction?

4. What does 'free information' mean to you?

How to add text to our class site:

1) add "/edit" to the website URL

2) Type in USERNAME: hackingthenet
and PASSWORD: hackingthenet1466

3) To add your text, click the window once, then click the TOP LEFT SQUARE

MALFUNCTIONS

Screenshot of archived view, Jodi.org's "OSS," 2000. Image curtesy of Rhizome ArtBase via artsy.net.

The last artwork we look at would be jodi.org's "OSS" project from 2000.

This section of the lecture would touch on the artist as programmer, and also the ways in which the artwork has an interactive component for those with background knowledge in hacking. The artwork can be added to by contributing a code to try to 'combat' the jodi.org pop-ups, inevitably leading to a feedback loop of frenetic pop-ups.

INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY

APPROPRIATION

IF YOU HAVE A LAPTOP PLEASE GO TO:

hackingthenet.hotglue.me

Arcangel's process encourages the dissemination of free information, but premiered at the Whitney?

The activity can also be completed on a phone or tablet

Why did the Whitney want
to collect Arcangel's work?

i am having fun in this class

How does net art from the early 2000s connect to NFTs in the 2020s

Wark's description of vector class...

2. In my opinion, it's a bit of both

Cory Arcangel's hack of Super Mario Bros

Welcome to Imogen Clendinning's
guest lecture for

WEEK FOUR: Money and Management

In class today we will be:

* learning about the history and prevalence of the CARFAC fee structure and Artist-Run Centres

* working together to create a budget for a hypothetical group exhibition! Each of you will take on the role of researching project grants, artist fees, equipment, promotion and fundraising for our exhibition.

But first, I'll briefly introduce myself....

Here I am at the artist-run centre Artcite Inc, where I worked as the Programming Coordinator from 2018-2021

... and installing a PV panel on the roof of an ice shack for a solar-powered digital archive project in 2023

Last year I worked with the Centre for Sustainable Curating to design a solar-powered archive for the project 'Objects as Temporal Entities.' If you are curious about digital infrastructure in the arts, let's talk after class or email me at iwilso3@uwo.ca.

In class today we will be digging into the key components of organizing a budget, and grant writing for museum work and arts administration. I think, before we get there, it's important to look back on the roots of these practices as well as the collective activism and advocacy which informed the fabric of arts admin work today.

This is especially relevant to us; as London Ontario in the 1960s -70s was the site of formative artist collective action which led to the founding of CARFAC, and invigorated the artist-run gallery movement of the 1970s.

"One vital component of the ideology of Regionalism... was collectivism." The London Regionalists’ "were among the earliest and most enthusiastic innovators of artist cooperatives in Canada due in part to the city's small size, relative isolation, and conservative art establishment, which gave artists few professional options to publish and exhibit their work at the start of the 1960s."

-Christopher Régimbal, Institutions of Regionalism: Artist Collectivism in London, Ontario, 1960-1990.

The Arts Economy 2015-today

A diagram of contemporary arts by Andrea Fraser, which Prof Hyett may have already shown? This diagram is a great visual aid to describe the layered roles shifting between arts academia, community work and the arts market, which often leads to artists "wearing many hats."

"Wearing many hats" is a professional requirement for many in the Canadian arts community, though it is less often acknowledged as a survival tactic or a way to generate practice-based revenue. Like many artist-academics, we quite enjoy working this way--what Michael Maranda calls a peer-driven "work preference economy."

-Anthea Black, Nicole Burisch, Michael Maranda, Kirsty Robertson, Shannon Stratton, Still Performing Austerity: Artists, Work, and Economic Speculation, 85-86.

"Academia, which is fuelled by a highly exploitable labour force that is often all too hungry to "pay to play" at conferences... [or, perhaps group exhibitions, performances, music events etc.] increasingly mashes up against an art world marked by outdated myths that devalue artistic labour.."

-Anthea Black, Nicole Burisch, Michael Maranda, Kirsty Robertson, Shannon Stratton, Still Performing Austerity: Artists, Work, and Economic Speculation, 86.

Let's Play some Arts Budget DnD!

For this activity, you are no longer students! You are now a DIY artist collective. Some of you are emerging and mid career practicing artists, others are recent graduates, musicians, independent scholars or writers. Your art collective is still very grassroots, you do not have not-for-profit status or any board of directors to report to.

Your group will be organizing a three person multimedia pop-up exhibition which will run for one month. Because your collective doesn’t have operational funding (I will elaborate on funding structure later on!), you do not have the funds for a long term lease of a gallery space, and so, you will need to secure a short term rental for your exhibition.







The three artists in your exhibition are Video Artist, Installation Artist and Sound Artist, each of whom have different material and equipment needs. In order to secure the necessary funds to cover the rental of your space, equipment, artist fees and promotional fees you have decided to apply for a Project Grant and invite on a Community Partner who may hopefully sponsor a component of the exhibition.

You decide together that because there are many of you eager to help organize the show, you will split into groups of four or five. Each group will research a section of the exhibition organizing, and you will collaboratively build a budget for your exhibition.

At the end of the research session, if you are in Group A: Grant Writers or Group B: Community Partnerships you will tell us how much $ you secured for the project. If you are in Group C: Artist Fees or Group D: Equipment and Promotion you will share how much $ it will cost to host our exhibition.

Our hypothetical art collective is inspired by local arts groups here in London like Good Sport, the Embassy Cultural House and the Coves Collective. These are three active arts groups in town that you can contact if you are interested in being more involved in the local arts scene in London!

GROUP A:
Grant Writers

This group will decide which Project Grant is the best fit for your project.

The Canada Council for the Arts is the federal granting body, and the Ontario Arts Council is our provincial funding agency. At both the CCA and the OAC, not-for-profit organizations with a consistent revenue and a board of directors can apply every three years for Operational Funding, which supports the ongoing operations of arts groups.

The OAC and CCA also offer Project Grants, to support single events or projects, including exhibitions, publications, screenings, workshops, conferences, publications or catalogues.

You can also apply for Project Grants through local Arts Councils. Arts Councils are not-for-profit arts service organizations, which sometimes operate independently, and in some instances work with municipal government to offer community arts grants to the local arts scene.

Although less common, you may decide to apply for a private or commercial project grant! These grants sometimes include stipulations like including corporate branding in promotional materials.

YOUR MANDATE:
You are a DIY artist collective of thirty members, who are dedicated to bringing experimental contemporary art to London, ON, with a focus on new media. You offer opportunities for emerging artists and students to show their work. Members of your collective are dedicated to environmental advocacy, and your programming showcases the works of emerging BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ artists.

Because you don't have operational funding your collective can be nimble with its programming, featuring current cutting edge artworks and operating on a shorter timeline.

THE ARTISTS

The three artists in the exhibition all use new media including sound, video and installation art to explore the effects of climate change in the city of London.

Video Artist a London-based artist screening a short film about a solar power farm in London. They require one solar panel that they will use as a screen, and a digital projector. Their film archive was recently acquired by Vtape, the Toronto-based video art distribution company (https://vtape.org).

Installation Artist will be making a concrete sculpture in the gallery that they plan to manually degrade using chemicals and drilling, and will draw a QR code into the concrete. Their installation is about the fragility of man-made infrastructure and digital infrastructure. They will require 8 2x4s and 10 bags of cement.

Sound Artist is a student at Western University. They will be showing a sound recording of the deshkan ziibi. They would like the sound to be immersive and so they have asked the collective to provide a spotlight sound dome.

GROUP B:
Community Partnerships

Project grants you will discover, all have different eligibility requirements. There are many grants available, and they are structured to support different kinds of projects. Grant Writers should be sure that our ad hoc art collective is eligible, and that the grant we apply to funds art exhibitions.

Community Partnership is a vital component of arts organizing! This group will decide which Community Partner to approach to ask them to partner with us for the exhibition.

Community Partnerships can take many forms, including financial sponsorship, in-kind gifts, free use of venue space, or promotional exchange.

You may choose to approach a local business, a corporate sponsor, a university or college, or a not-for-profit.

As a starting out point, it is often beneficial to approach outside groups who you have an existing connection to. As well, the most impactful partnerships are those that feel organic, where there are mutual benefits for your project and the community partner. When these relationships are the most successful, they create growth in arts spaces, encouraging exchange between the arts community and other local groups!

Day Without Art Film Screening, Artcite Inc. For this screening we partnered with the University of Windsor (who offered screening space & audiovisual support), the AIDS Committee of Windsor who provided promotional support, and Visual AIDS who paid the screening fees for the films.

TO DO:
*research Project Grants from the OAC, CCA, LAC and any other grant agency you find

*decide on a Project Grant that meets the eligibility requirements of your collective and that works for the timeline of the group

*you may be approached by other collective members to collaborate

*Once you decide on the grant(s) you will apply to, find the DM to "email the Program Administrator."

NOTE: Some partners might not offer a financial gift, but instead free space, free food, maybe they agree to pay some or all of the artist fees or they will help you promote the event. If your partner offers funds to pay the artist fees, you much talk to Group D.

TO DO:

* decide on the Community Partner

*research the mandate of the CP

*discuss together, after researching their work, what is the CP likely to offer in donation? For example, do they have a storefront space, do they have a large membership to offer promotion?

*call over the DM to "write a letter to their Board of Directors."

GROUP C:
Artist Fees

Group C will research the appropriate artist fees for the group exhibition, referring to the 2025 CARFAC fee schedule and the Vtape website.

CARFAC maintains a fee structure for artworks that are not for sale, these are royalties paid to the artist in exchange for the presentation of their work. They also offer fee structures for reproduction, and Artist Professional Service fees; compensation of an artist’s labour and time but not their artwork, this includes workshops, speakers fees, installation and other forms of artist labour.

CARFAC’s royalty fee structure for exhibition is divided across different scales of galleries and museums. The fee paid to the artist is determined by the size of the presenting organization, which is mainly categorized by an organization’s operating budget: their earnings, private sector revenue and how much they receive in operating grants (we discussed those earlier).

All of the Canadian organizations that receive municipal,
federal and/or provincial funding fall in Categories One
through Three. Category Three is operating budgets over
$1 Million, Category Two is operating budgets of $500,001
to $1 Million and Category One is under $500,000.

CARFAC lays out specific minimums for solo exhibitions as
well as group shows, and their royalties generaly cover
exhibitions up to three months in duration.

To Do:

*in the CARFAC website, research the appropriate artist fees for the exhibition

*Installation Artist is working with heavy concrete and requires assistance. Research compensating an installation assistant as well

*research distribution fees at Vtape and call over Prof Hyett to "email Deirdre Logue for a quote on a screening fee for Video Artist."

*call over the DM to "send the artists their contracts." Remember, CARFAC is a minimum recommendation, and it is very normal for artists to request further compensation

Image capture from the CARFAC 2025 Fee Schedule for solo exhibitions up to three months.

GROUP D:
Equipment and Promotion

This encapsulates the vital technical requirements necessary in pulling together a successful exhibition, and there are many critical expenses in this section that can make or break your project.

In some cases, an artist will provide their own materials and equipment, but at the DIY level, with many artists facing financial precarity, arts workers often offer their help to cover the costs of materials.

Equipment can also encompass expenses related to
the presentation of the exhibition, including
materials to make the didactics, artist statements,
artwork labels or exhibition catalogues. As a group,
decide on the projected cost of didactics and labels,
researching the cost of vinyl or different material
options.

Finally, your group should research the projected
cost of promoting the exhibition. Will you print
postcards or posters for the show? There is also
the option of purchasing "Sponsored Posts" on
Instagram or Facebook.

TO DO:

*assess the technical and material needs of the three artists

*create a budget of equipment that includes materials associated with the presentation of the exhibition: didactics, artwork labels. Will there be a catalogue?

*research costs associated with the promotion, this cost will also be added to our budget

*Installation Artist and Sound Artist think they could apply for Ontario Arts Council's Exhibition Assistance grant to fund the installation of their work. Talk with Group A: Grant Writers to see if our artists are eligible

In the planning stage of the exhibition, if you choose to centre sustainability in the collective's work.

In many instances, choosing more sustainable options can help mitigate expenses, it just takes more time to plan.

If your group is interested in sustainability in the exhibition design, you may refer to the Centre for Sustainable Curating's Resource Guide.

During your sleuthing & research, you can use this MIND MAP to share resources and information with one another

UPCOMING 
POP-UP EXHIBITION

GRANT WRITING

COMMUNITY 
PARTNERSHIP

EQUIPMENT

PROMOTION

Does our exhibition centre sustainability? How does this factor into the cost?

ARTIST FEES

CARFAC

Vtape

which grant is right for us? you can list some of the options here!

Are there other organizations or groups that would be a good fit to partner with our exhibition?

You've found an accessible downtown storefront that is willing to rent you their space short term for $1500. But, is there anything better out there?

How to add text to our class site:

1) add "/edit" to the website URL

2) Type in USERNAME: hackingthenet
and PASSWORD: CARFAC2025

3) To add your text, click the window once, then click the TOP LEFT SQUARE

Do we want posters, flyers, postcards?

Social media outreach?

EXHIBITION 
ASSISTANCE

which artists are eligible?

artist talks?

installation assistant

Ontario Arts Council
Exhibition Assistance
- $500 $2,000
- Collectives eligible
- Presentation costs, insurance etc included
- Cons are the grant opens mid-August
- *We have to harang the artists to Inidividually apply for this*

Canada Council
Public Outreach - Arts Across Canada
- Up to $100,000
- Collectives eligible
- April 9th Deadline

6,000

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7000

2356

385

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