By Chelsea Thompto for e-flux Journal.

A Hacked Manifesto is an artwork in the form of an online tool for exploring McKenzie Wark's A Hacker Manifesto, giving the user/viewer the ability to manipulate, disassemble, reassemble, shift, search, and other modify the text. This net art piece engages directly with hacking as a gesture as defined within the source text.

“To hack is to abstract. To abstract is to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation.” [083]

This work brings the text itself into a plane upon which new relations can form. The experience of this work will be a web interface where users/viewers will have access to a variety of tools for reordering, searching, selecting, replacing, and other textual gestures. This work is not about using tools that could be understood as generative AI but rather is focused on computation as a tool for textual collage and exploration.

Source Code for the work can be found here: https://github.com/cthompto/a-hacked-manifesto

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