Talk presented at <http://www.tedxvienna.at/>TEDxVienna, November 2010.
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2Rvh8VG3o8
The term "context hacking" - like its older
mimetic sibling "communication guerrilla" -
refers to unconventional forms of communication
and/or intervention in more conventional
processes of communication. Context hacking is a
specific style of political action drawing from a
watchful view of the paradoxes and absurdities of
power, turning these into the starting point for
subversive interventions. It's a strategy of
playing with representations and identities, with
alienation and over-identification. But a
fundamental question remains: is it still
possible to subvert? Or are we all stuck in an
endless late-capitalist cycle of revolt and
assimilation? Johannes Grenzfurthner will present
a project by
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/>monochrom, a
worldwide operating collective from Vienna
dealing with technology, art, and philosophy.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Grenzfurthner>Johannes
Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and
director. He is the founder of monochrom, an
internationally acting art and theory group. He
holds a professorship for art theory and art
practice at the University of Applied Sciences in
Graz, Austria. He is head of the "Arse
Elektronika" festival in San Francisco, host of
"Roboexotica" (Festival for Cocktail-Robotics,
Vienna and San Francisco), and co-curates the
Paraflows Symposium in Vienna. He gave talks at
SXSWi, O'Reilly ETech, FooCamp, Maker Faire,
HOPE, Chaos Communication Congress, Google (Tech
Talks), ROFLCon, Ars Electronica, Transmediale,
Influencers or the Neoteny Camp Singapore. He and
his projects have been featured in New York
Times, Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN,
Reuters, Slashdot, Boing Boing, LA Times, NPR,
ZDF, Gizmodo, Wired, Süddeutsche Zeitung, CNet or the Toronto Star.
