This essay will examine the representation of hackers in relation to that of the artist in an effort to determine how these figures are constructed and if they share a common ground. It will also attempt to show how a critical point of view adopted from the hacker culture and the Open Source movement can inform art criticism and production. I hope that looking at another field will illuminate some of the elements of the construction of the artist and of the art world. There may also be an advantage in attempting to examine another discipline from within when so much of our own already seems to be investigating it, but from its own perspective, rather than adopting the point of view of its participants.

After a short explanation of terms, I will examine notions of overarching narratives, identity and suspense, as well as considerations on the notion of genius and authenticity associated with the art world and that of hacker culture.

Hacker: One who "hacks" software, that is who can create new programs or assemble new programs from preexisting ones. Usually, the software created by a hacker is made available to others wishing to improve it or change it some more. A hacker is distinct from a computer programmer in a way that Jackson Pollock is different from the "Sunday-painter".

Cracker: The interest of the cracker lies in bypassing security measures that protect software or servers with the aim of offering the result of their 'labour' to everyone else. Internet lingo refers to software where security protection has been removed as a crack, or Cracker’s as pirates. There is a widespread confusion about these naming conventions when in the public domain and hacker is the term most often used for crackers in the media, much to the chagrin of the true virtuous hacker.

In movies, the identity of the hacker is predicated upon the narrative imperative of entertainment. It demands suspense and action and the figure of the hacker is one through which it often occurs. Even when the entire narrative is not centered on the hacker, the climactic scenes often offer situations where the themes of judgment and redemption are played out. These scenes often occur in the presence of the computer screen and its operator, conveniently populated by large blinking countdowns or electrical sparks and clouds of smoke.

The artist's narrative are not presented in such a dramatic light. But even if more subdued, the narrative imperative is ever present. The biological metaphor is most often applied to artists. Starting with the 'artist's lives' by Vasari -themselves strongly influenced by hagiography, the cycles of youth (pre-classic), maturity (classic) and older age (decadence) have played themselves out on the level of the artist, a period of the artist's life, a whole oeuvre or even an artistic style. The figure of the promising, genius-like yet doomed artist are often used to generate a pathos and reflection on the larger themes of creativity in the face of death. The abundance of films on the life and death of Vincent Van Gogh is an example of this.¹ The biological narrative can be associated to a work of art or a whole life or even a stylistic period.

Signatures can take many forms and real identities are often hidden behind handles that serve to hold a complex mix of biography, style and historical context. Thus "Vincent" evokes in us: a certain Night Sky, Saint-Remy, expressionism and a tortured soul. Once established, the signature functions as gatekeeper of authenticity. Whether a work of art can or can not enter into an

artist's oeuvre is based on the definition of the signature. The signature prevents others from making use of a style, or ideas associated with it.

The hacker's handle is similar in function to the artist signature in that it also a term rich in meanings. It acts as a marker of affiliations to groups, a personal style of coding and past and present projects.²

The suspense filled movie is modeled on the inquisitive detective movie. The culprit having to be tracked, the evidence in lieu of signature that can lead inquisitive minds to the origin of the crime. Quirks of coding or other telling traces serve as evidence that points to the elusive hacker. In art history, Giovanni Morelli proposed to rationalize connoisseurship by categorizing small elements of the representation and provided a way to assert the validity of an attribution in the shape of a cloud, or that of an ear. Thus both art history and feature films construct their subjects as strong identities given away by their distinctive idiosyncrasies.³

Progressive in some respects, the image of hackers in most movies is still biased towards the male gender. It can safely be said that this bias is an accurate representation of gender distribution in the hacker population. Both the figure of the hacker and that of the artist are tributary to the notion of genius. Elaborated in the distant past, it still informs the present. In her book, Gender and Genius; towards a feminist aesthetics (1989), Christine Battersby demonstrates that the notion of genius from its origin in the Renaissance to its actualization in the XIXth century, genius is defined as a blend of the feminine and masculine only attainable by the male gender. The feminine quality of creativity and feeling necessarily sublimated by the male ego and intellect.⁴

Declarations such as 'never send a boy to do a woman's job''⁵ take their meaning from the reversal of the conventional order. They are figures of alterity in the public eye where otherness has been a characteristic of genius. Both artist and hacker are outside of the norm.

The elements above demonstrate a certain proximity to the way the identities of the artist and programmer are constructed. I contend that art theoreticians and artists have much to gain from looking at the hacker world. Its most important aspect is the Open Source movement and its opposition to proprietary software. This movement has been largely obscured by the commercial imperative guiding the development of technology.

The ethos of the Open Source movement is summed up in the GPL (or the General Public License) that accompanies open source code. The following is an extract from the preamble of the General Public License:

"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users."⁶

The GPL license has far ranging implications for the normal production and distribution model of software.⁷ It stipulates that code derived from open source code must be freely distributed. “Copyleft is a general method for making a program free software and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free software as well.”⁸ In this way, knowledge is available and shared between individuals as copyleft finds it’s way through the corpus of available software tools like a virtuous virus.

Commentators often overlook this essential characteristic of much software (artistic and otherwise) being produced and distributed on the web. When Earl Miller in "Jenni's Web" rightly exposes the misleading utopian character of the web, he falls short of recognizing that it also intrinsically holds the promise of a "very real and radical challenge to the capitalist privatization of space"⁹.

Open source is an example of when the technological becomes the political. Its politically charged potential can be understood through older schemes of analysis, that of the modes of production rather than that of the politics of representation. Jennicam is certainly not operating from an open source outlook but other artworks and software projects exist that do.¹⁰

If we change point of view and do not look at how technology can be used for art but how technology can inform art practice, then some real challenges to more traditional notions of authenticity and originality emerge.

The work of art as well as the concepts informing it (the intellectual property) are believed to be the property of the artist and often hotly defended. Applying an Open Source model to art creation would go beyond the approved phenomenon of appropriation and the work structure of the closed collective. Originality and genius, the status of the artwork as a finished object and by consequence on the collecting system are all elements of the practice of art that would be deeply affected by working in such a manner.

A work of art placed under the Open Source license would mean an end to copyright. All parts of the actual work of art as well as the reflections guiding it would enter the public domain. Free for others to learn from and react to with the only condition to also release the rights from any subsequent creation.

Carol Duncan’s analysis of the power structures of the art world puts into view how much the value of the work of art is predicated on the figure of the lone artist. “From this point on, the modern art market took shape as a haven for alienated, expatriated, and idealistic talent - But a haven whose freedoms would be limited by the needs of its adventurous capitalist supporters”¹¹ Individuality is the necessary condition to the art market’s acceptance of vanguard art forms. With this primary condition, it is difficult to see how situations of rich collaboration of plural authorship can be validated by an art market’s whose values are derived on the branding of an artist name, it’s signature.

It is important to note that Open Source projects shaped by a number of collaborating signatures have their parallel in the world of art especially within the realm of performance art and art collectives. Perhaps an avenue of commonality that already exists between the practices can be seen in Suzi Gablik's article Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism: "...comparing models of the self based on isolation and connectedness has given me a different sense of art that I had before and changed my ideas about what is important."¹² The changing modes of production of software and art are having an impact not only upon the result of the activity but also encouraging a validation of the process itself as a source of fulfillment and discovery.