The Art of Networking

Since the 80s, the platforms of networking have been an important tool to share knowledge and experience to create works of hacktivism and net art. The concepts of "Openness" and "Do-It-Yourself", today more and more relevant with the diffusion of Social Networks, have been the starting point for the development of punk culture and hacker ethic. Hackers are not just those who destructively intrude computer systems or spread viruses into the Internet (and who should be more correctly called "crackers"), but those who share the good of knowledge, fight for free communication and open access to information, with the objective of a public domain of knowledge. The "hacktivism" concept refers to an acknowledgment of the net as a political space, with the possibility of decentralized, autonomous and grassroots democratic participation. Access for everybody, information as a free good and the conscious, use of hardware and technology, the basic concepts of hacker ethics, are referred as political objectives. According to this point of view, networking means to create nets of relations, by sharing experiences and ideas in order to communicate and experiment artistically. According with this point of view, networking platforms are free spaces in which the publisher and the reader, the artist and the public, act on the same level. Art provides a critical perspective on political imagination; networking projects act inside social interstices and cultural fractures, which apparently seem to be at the margin of daily life, but instead are an important territory for the re-invention and re-writing of symbolic and expressive codes. Imaginative codes which can transform and decode our present. As a practical example, I will refer to the concept of hacktivism and art through some Italian underground interventions and actions, previously described in my book "Networking. The Net as Artwork", recently translated into English and available online under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3, November 2008 at: http://darc.imv.au.dk/?p=62 (Digital Aesthetics Research Center of Aarhus University).

Tatiana Bazzichelli (Rome, IT, 1974), is a communication sociologist and an expert in network culture, hacktivism and net art. She is a Ph.D. Scholar at Aarhus University, Denmark.