October 13, 2013
Hackers. They seem to be everywhere, landing headlines in the news, founding companies in Silicon Valley and hacker spaces around the world, and at times, facing years in jail. Despite this presence, they are everywhere misunderstood. Spaces of hacking, the first of three events seeking to demystify the hacker, will contextualize the acts of hacking in light of the spaces and places where it unfolds: the hacker space, the free software project, the biolab, the media, the law, and the server. To spatialize hacking is to orient our questions to those of travel and translation: why and where does hacking descend and take root? Where are the limits and boundary waters where hacking cannot go?
How do we conceptualize the act of travel and translation: as accidental errantry, calculated translation, acts of mutation? What impels movement and change?
Bringing together a diverse set of scholars and practitioners, we will hold two panels that explore the spaces of hacking followed by a reception. The first panel will probe physical spaces: the hack lab, the bio lab and the art-bio lab, and the second panel takes a more thematic approach examining how hacking has interfaced with gender, with the media, and with digital dissent.
Panel One: Hacker Spaces and Labs
- Alessandro Delfanti, Biohacker Contamination (McGill)
- Tagny Duff, Title TBD (Concordia)
- Johan Soderberg, Precursors to Open Hardware in the Czech Republic (Laboratoire territoire, techonologie et société (LATTS))
- Suparna Choudhury, Hacking the Brain (Ï㽶ÊÓƵ)
- Denisa Kera, Mobile Labs for Open Science: Open Source Hardware in the Global South (National University of Singapore)
Commentator: xSmurf (Foulab)
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Panel Two: Unraveling and Raveling
- Gabriella Coleman, Trust and Anonymity in Anonymous (Ï㽶ÊÓƵ)
- Anne Goldenburg, Hacking with Care (UQAM)
- Molly Sauter, Disruption (Ï㽶ÊÓƵ)
- Lia Lynch, Journalists on/as hackers (Concordia)
Commentator: David Mizra, Subgraph
Funding for the event provided by the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and Media@McGill.
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