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Hackers

ducers

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Artists and hackers both represent contemporary
types of unconventional authorship. In their own
respective ways, they both appear as autonomous
producers and not as contractors. Their autonomy
is based on an aspiration towards individual freedom,
but they each justify this in completely different ways.
In an emphatic sense, freedom is the foundation of
an artist’s work. This freedom legitimates or even
demands a demiurgic act of positioning from which
the work then unfolds — and it justifies the close
relationship between “author” and “work”. In contrast,
a hacker begins by experiencing an absolute dearth
of freedom. His work unfolds while dealing with an

Felix Stalder

183

Texte entier tout pdf combinés :
omnipotent system! in which all options for action
are predetermined. The hacker’s goal is to seize hold
of moments of freedom anyway.

“Artists” and “hackers” are ideal types here,
conceptual abstractions. They were formed to make
certain contexts more tangible. In the following, the
focus will be directed towards the relationship be-
tween respective notions of freedom and social mecha-
nisms functioning within regimes of order.

The assumption that artists begin from a posi-
tion of complete freedom is a historical development
as a part of liberal concepts of freedom: Every man is
born in liberty, which is finally expressed by the stew-
ardship rights he has for his own body.’ This freedom
legitimates private property, understood as the fruits
of the labor performed by one’s own body. This con-
cept is directed against old forms of serfdom, bonded
labor and arbitrary disenfranchisement or taxation.
It re-oriented society away from the distribution of
goods based on privilege bestowed by a sovereign and
towards the production of goods by entrepreneurs;
their objectives were thus moved to the center of
society’s agenda. This concept of freedom as the point
of foundation for social interaction was essential for
the liberal understanding of the interrelated catego-
ries “individual” and “private property”.

1 Systems are integrated contexts of function. What functioning is
can be determined technically, culturally or institutionally.

2 John Locke’s (1632-1704) formulation of individual freedom as
determined by the stewardship over one’s own body is conceived of
from a clearly male perspective. Self-determination of a female body
is still, even in liberal societies, a question of debate.

184

In this cosmos, the artist represents the most radically
expressed form of an individual’s civil liberty. This
entity is then doubly privileged by the legal order:
on the one hand, by the legal establishment of the
freedom of art, which guarantees the artist’s freedom
to work;? on the other hand, by copyright law. This
allows him to enforce the claim of understanding his
work to be the product of his labor alone, and there-
fore his exclusive property. Historically, this allowed
the artist to exit from a dependency on commission-
ing entities and to engage an audience from an equal
position. It was an emancipatory act, no doubt. So

_ far, so good.

The clarity of these findings, as the political
scientist Christian Schmidt notes, “is disturbed by
the regime of property’s propensity to expand its area
of applicability”.* The property concept’s prerequi-
sites become problematic to the degree that forms of
ideas and free will become subject to capitalist pro-
duction, such as when youth culture is transformed
into products. The consequences of this expansion
are that “the clear separation between people and
property, or put differently, people’s autonomy is
questioned”.°

If a person constitutes himself or herself as the
sole active author, then others are forced into the role
of being a passive audience. As long as this is only done

3 Art. 21 of the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation
determines: “The freedom of art is guaranteed.”

4 Schmidt, Christian: Individualitat und Eigentum. Zur Rekonstruktion
zweier Grundbegriffe der Moderne. Frankfurt am Main 2006, p. 13.

5 Ibid., p. 107.

185
�Media Hack
Lock Picking

Cb. ----— — 5

Hacker brechen Systeme auf und andern Regeln.

niert auch Kiinstlerinnen und Kiinstler, wie
Arbeiten von etoy, UBERMORGEN und der IMediengruppe
Bitnik zeigen. Texte von Raffael Dérig, Hannes Gassert,
Verena Kuni, Claus Pias und Felix Stalder.

Das faszi

stems and change rules. Artists are
as the work ofetoy, UBERMORGEN
tnik shows. Contributions by
ert, Verena Kuni, Claus Pias

Hackers break into sy
also fascinated by this,
and the !Mediengruppe Bi
Raffael Dérig, Hannes Gass
and Felix Stalder.

 

www.edition- digitalculture.ch

eww Ee LEIS

Script Kiddie
etc.

www.edition-digitalculture.ch | l | | il

Poster

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