Hacking the Spaces

Presented at HOPE Number Nine (2012), July 15, 2012, 1 p.m. (60 minutes).

In 2009, Johannes and Frank Apunkt Schneider published their critical pamphlet “Hacking the Spaces,” causing a shitstorm in forums and mailing lists. The publication of the text on Boing Boing was even called a “PR disaster for the hackerspaces movement” by various members of the scene. Three years later, the discussion is still raging. Are hackerspaces the inclusionist paradises that their members want them to be, or are they just white middle-class boys’ clubs generating nothing more than a few more streamlined members of “Generation Self-Exploitation?” This talk is an invitation to look at the debate and analyze its potential and drama. We promise dramatic potential and the potentially dramatic!


Presenters:

  • Sean Bonner
    Sean Bonner is a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, journalist, activist, and enthusiast. Currently, his time is split between Safecast (an open global sensor network currently monitoring radiation levels in Japan), Neoteny Labs (an early stage consumer Internet startup fund focusing on Southeast Asia), and Coffee Common (a customer education brand collaboration launched at TED 2011). He is one of the founders of Crash Space (a Los Angeles hackerspace) and has been a regular contributor to BoingBoing.
  • Johannes Grenzfurthner
    Johannes Grenzfurthner is an artist, writer, curator, and director. He is the founder and artistic director 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. Recurring topics in Johannes’ artistic and textual work are contemporary art, activism, performance, humor, philosophy, postmodernism, media theory, cultural studies, sex tech, popular culture studies, science fiction, and the debate about copyright.

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