[Nettime-bold] announce opensorcery.net

[anne-marie <amschle@cadre.sjsu.edu>]

Announcing new site :

http://www.opensorcery.net

Opensorcery.net is a collection of texts and projects by Anne-Marie
Schleiner related to the hacker-like strategies of network art production,
open source modes  of computer game development at both code and content
levels, game hacking and modifications, gamer culture, game avatar gender
construction, female skins and patches, and female gamer alliances.

Some of the texts available for the first time on the site include an
expanded version of "Does Lara Croft wear fake polygons?", rewritten for
Leonardo, and "Parasitic Interventions: Game Patches and Hacker Art", an
article that includes discussion of many of the artworks presented in the
"Cracking the Maze: Game Plug-ins and Patches as Hacker Art" online exhibit.

Urls to add to the url section are welcome.

-a-m

from "Parasitic Interventions: Game Patches and Hacker Art"(July 1999) :

"Like the hip-hop sampler or reggae dub mixer, the game patch artist
manipulates the prefab semiotics of the game engine, a kind of "versioning"
that reorganizes along both paradigmatic and syntagmatic axeses.[17] Like
"hactivist" Electronic Disturbance Theater's net.art attacks on government
websites on behalf of the Zapatistas, game hacking and distribution of game
hacks online are art strategies that offer the possibility for artists to
participate in cultural intervention outside of a closed art world sphere.
[18]Patch art structurally couples itself in symbiotic or parasitic relations
to the host technocultural systems of the industrial game engine and online
game fan networks, an art form whose tentacles reach outward into the
fabric of technocultural subdomains with the capacity for effecting the
evolution of popular gaming culture.

The process of software hacking, including game software, is a non-linear
multi-directional searching for loopholes and bugs through a meshwork of
code (similar to the process of debugging). Take for instance the
operational mode of a late 80's "phreaker".[19] The phreaker enters into an
alien digitized phone switcher system that she did not write. Without fully
understanding the mechanics of the switching program the phreaker tweaks a
chunk of code here, a chunk of code there until she effects a change in the
ontogenetic structure of the program. (Maybe she hooks up the number for
the Christian Coalition to a phone sex line, maybe she embeds a tag in the
code, a mark of her territory that later inadvertently leads to a system
wide shutdown.) Likewise, culture hacking can begin with non-structured
manipulation of an alien or semi-unknown cultural system that effects a new
system identity."

http://www.opensorcery.net



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