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Hacker as Trickster

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I extended the Metatrixx research and devised a workshop course in Hacking minor at WDKA Rotterdam in autumn 2022 titled Hacker as trickster, involving a group of 9 students over the span of 4 months. 

 

Through guided experiences, quantum meditations and embodiment workshops, we examined the impact oppressive systems on our bodies, how to awaken the trickster myth as a valid form of artistic inquiry, the trickster as lens through which we create and see the world, which become a tool to shift power dynamics, subvert systems, raise controversy, and find alternative (knowledge) paths. 

 

 

Hacker as Trickster - Course text

 

Trickster plays a wide variety of contrasting roles in myths, to show our idea of integrity means always one sided attachment to the prevailing systems. Alike trickster in myth, a hacker is a shadow character, as is posthuman in philosophy. All three figures embody ireconciealable dualities, and with their non-adherence to a limited or fixed identity pattern, these characters point out the blind spots and biases, with which they both entertain, illuminate and anger those around. 

 

Trickster consciousness shows our ideas of authenticity, performativity, integrity, truth, gender, identity, humaness are changing in what Jean Baudrillard named a hyper-reality (a simulation, or an aggregate of images and simulations, that either distorts the reality it purports to depict or does not in fact).

 

Awakening the trickster mode means that we open up to a fuller bandwidth of experience and in the computer-mediated realities find “alternative” sources of knowledge such as intuition, body senses, more-than-human knowledge, the collective subconscious. In mode of radical embodiment, we investigate how our bodies hold cues about the systems and their emotional, physical, and mental conditioning.

 

Trickster modes are those of metamorphosis, camouflage, deception, provocation, and embodying dualities, with which we seek new relationships between nature and men, intellect and body, sacred and profane. Being in Trickster consciousness is instrumental in embodying the hacker culture values such as decentralization, deconstruction, opec source, and autonomy.

 

 

Focus: 

Investigate the role of radical embodiment in post-truth age;

Hacking culture values;

somatic approach as instrumental in creative work;

examining where we are too fixed in one sided attachments, and where existing system have affected our bodies;

finding alternative modes of sharing knowledge;

embodiment turn and navigating between digital and physical realities. 

 

 

The result was a series of research based artistic inquiries into chosen topics of body politics, abortion rights and pro-life clinics, museum politics, associative drawing, intuitive knowledge, institutional politics and homophobia, social media, sacred rage, functionality of objects, etc that manifested in form of video works, museum interventions, speculative agencies.