Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen (eds.) Urban Hacking

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2 Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen (eds.) Urban Hacking

4 Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen (eds.) Urban Hacking Cultural Jamming Strategies in the Risky Spaces of Modernity

5 This publication was supported by the Department of Art Funding/ City of Vienna, Austria and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research. This publication is based on the symposium»urban HACKING. Cultural Jamming Strategies into the Risky spaces of Modernity.«, which took place 2009 in the context of the paraflows Festival in Vienna. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Scott Beale Proofread by Heather Kelly, Melinda Richka Translated by Ryan Crawford, David Horn, Odin Kroeger, Andrea Wald Typeset by Anika Kronberger Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN Global distribution outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland: Transaction Publishers Tel.: (732) Rutgers University Fax: (732) Berrue Circle for orders (U.S. only): Piscataway, NJ toll free

6 Table of Contents Introduction Welcome to the Battlefield. Please Make Yourself Comfortable Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen 9 1. Hacking the City Urban Hacking as a Practical and Theoretical Critique of Public Spaces Frank Apunkt Schneider, Günther Friesinger Urban Hacking as a Strategy for Urban (Re-)Planning/Designing Melanie Gadringer Spandrel Evolution. Emergent Spaces of Resistance in the 21st Century Bonni Rambatan Playing with the Built City Eleanor Saitta Please love Banksy. A retrospective on the options of an art of disruption in public space in Vienna. Thomas Edlinger Communication and Creativity Guerilla.com Johannes Grenzfurthner Guerrilla Gardening. Political protest, or mainstream-compatible, watered-down, wannabe subculture? Julia Jahnke Lenin as Major Urban Hacker in Lviv. From monument to market. Bohdan Shumylovych

7 Verbal Graffiti. Textures of unofficial messages in public space today Thomas Northoff Urban Hacking. An artist strategy Annett Zinsmeister The most dangerous thing on the air. Someone broadcasts something Thomas Thurner Improv Everywhere. An interview with Charlie Todd Johannes Grenzfurthner Codes and Consequences P2PFOUND CITIES. Project Proposal for the Reconstruction and the Preservation of Abruzzo Agatino Rizzo, Eric Hunting, Michel Bauwens, Cityleft, P2P Foundation code writing. On (Artificial) Writing Kerstin Ohler Urban Trash Zone. Notes on the collapsing city in Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmiths Fell: Feral City Verena-Cathrin Bauer CONTROL Thomas Ballhausen List of contributors 227

8 INTRODUCTION

10 Welcome to the Battlefield. Please Make Yourself Comfortable Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen Urban space is a battle field, symbols are appropriated, new structures created. Net culture replaces traditional counter culture and re-focuses its attention to a space of living that is changing at a fast pace: the city. By new means and venturing down new paths, enduring questions are recast, the central question being how cultural resistance is possible and can be lived in times of rising market pressure and conservative cultural policies; a question of enduring importance indeed. Here, at this precarious point in time, this anthology intervenes. We ask questions, we give answers, we take our responsibility seriously. This reader tries to adopt the motto Urban Hacking, i.e., and attempts to constructively-critically examine the cultural practices of desire, resignification, and subversive appropriation. The urban space and the cultural technique of hacking function as pillars for the investigation of historical as well as contemporary strategies of such culturally founded resistance. The topic of Urban Hacking, while appearing vague at first, shall be elucidated by breaking it down into three panels. The examples analyzed in connection therewith will not only reflect the status quo of what exists, but also contribute to a discussion about the options that remain open, i.e., about the possibilities and limitations of that discourse. Experts of respective fields submitted essays, interviews and prose on their areas of specialization in the according thematic groups, thereby

11 10 Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Ballhausen rendering the positive as well as negative sides of the connection between different approaches and concepts evident. This three-part reader corresponds to the thematic priorities Urban, Hacking, and Risk. The part Urban will discuss, from the perspectives of space theory and media geography, the conditions placed upon and the requirements demanded from the city as venue; e.g., the contributors will deliberate not only about the shift from place to space and its grounds in semiotics but also on space-bound questions of adapting phenomena and artefacts crossing media boundaries. The historical development of Guerrilla Art or the possibilities of art in the public space will be central to this discussion. The next part is dedicated to the multi-facetted notion of Hacking. Hence the second array of texts investigates the origin, structures, and evolutionary elements of that theme. Commencing from questions regarding technique and technology, advanced concepts and theories that are based on hacking and have been seminal for debates on the options of cultural resistance are being examined; e.g., Programme Code Poetry or the use of re-coding strategies in the fine arts. The third and final part will circle around the aspects of Risk and putting-oneself-on-the-line. Urban space and the discourse of the modern are conditioned by and condition each other, giving rise to approaches inspired by art and informed by philosophy to refuse, to transgress boundaries, and to ignite discussions about that of which we are told that we ought to accept. The conditions of historical and contemporary tactics of the transgressive are being investigated with reference to those aspects.

12 1. HACKING THE CITY

14 Urban Hacking as a Practical and Theoretical Critique of Public Spaces Frank Apunkt Schneider, Günther Friesinger Public Space as Text What is generally referred to as public space is, in fact, an intricate bundle of cultural-geographic and discursive structures i.e. a social artifact. Once we have moved away from the perspective according to which late capitalism s social environment is naturally given, then this statement may very well appear to be rather trivial. But this perspective is nevertheless hegemonic despite the fact that this supposed naturalness has now been interrupted by a financial crisis, a crisis which, after an appropriate homeopathic meditation, will bail out on us again, leaving only a ruin of individual catastrophes of the individuated subject s everyday lives in its wake. Perhaps it soothes one s own suffering as well as everybody s, the global as well as individual distress from capitalism to picture capitalism as the naturally given environment; as a power of destiny, effacing human lives and the products of their endeavors arbitrarily, unpredictably, and seemingly without affection. This perspective no doubt reconciles us to our late capitalist fate of hopelessness, lack of alternatives and relieves us of guilt feelings generated by our entanglement in social, cultural, and ecological catastrophes, catastrophes that we like to think of as occurring blindly, naturally not as the consequences of our own actions.

15 14 Frank Apunkt Schneider, Günther Friesinger But the manner in which capitalism presents itself to us as an all so natural environment is, in fact, the effect of social, cultural, economic, and ideological landscaping. This is especially the case in spaces we treat as public in our everyday communicative and cultural lives. Spaces we frequent and use: spaces which absorb and form us and, thus, allow us to appear. So as not to be powerlessly subjected to their formative forces, we need to understand how these spaces where we communicate, participate, and represent are constructed. We need to know both how and why they function, as well as who has an interest in their smooth functioning. It is clear from the well-known and tiring lamentations of helplessness crying about the loss of good old publicity that such an understanding is by no means self-evident. These lamentations generally dress themselves up in the language of nature conservation. What this outfit is missing is the fact that this seemingly idyllic public community is also only a product of capitalist dynamics, one that just happens to belong to a productline now discontinued. Classical theories of public space and publicity have failed to provide a critical understanding because they are unable to acknowledge their own ideological position within spatial structuring. Of course the public sphere s functional relationships cannot be reduced to media s self-referential mode of production, as Marshall McLuhan would have us believe. Nor can they be deduced solely from systemic inner-worldliness, as Niklas Luhmann and his systems theory claims. And they certainly cannot be grasped through an exploration of the interactional dimension of social communication according to the model of Jürgen Habermas, who regards the unequal political and economic distribution of power exclusively in terms of a distortion of ideal social communication. For the latter, communicative inequality is, at best, a problem to be corrected through social means not the very condition of possibility of the utilitarian system and the spaces and places produced by its labor. Habermas strictly idealist argument, which regards social being as a causal effect of consciousness alone, betrays the analysis of economic relations to liberal practices of self-ascertainment. Such a theory cannot want to know about the economic constraints binding social subjects; it cannot want to see whatever a shirtsleeve meliorism fails to conceal. In contrast to this, an emancipatory theory of social communication must be capable of delineating the way in which the principles of mediality inscribe themselves in the forms and modes of articulation of the subjects

Roberto Simanowski, Jörgen Schäfer, Peter Gendolla (eds.) Reading Moving Letters

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