Cyberdelia is an online poetry/art/miscellany project dedicated to showcasing a single work every month. Our focus is on intertextuality, specificity, and not being corpos.
We take our name and aesthetic from Hackers (1995), a movie about doing righteous hacks with your squad of cyberqueers. In it, Cyberdelia is a gathering place. There’s a shaft-based arcade game, dancing, and kissing with tongue. Information is exchanged, aliases adopted and toggled through, community is built and sustained through joy.
While we love and appreciate cyber aesthetics and technological wonders, our definition of “hackers” is not computer-specific. Instead we are influenced by the broader definition found in McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto (2004):
“A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction…We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers…”
We read abstraction here as a kind of possibility, a capacity, something yet-to-be. Some abstraction is violent. Some abstraction is the basis for informed action— the hack. We are looking for work that achieves a righteous hack. We are not asking for any degree of computer mastery, nor are we requesting that you crash 1,507 systems and cause a 7 point drop in the stock market… but we wouldn’t be opposed to that either.
“To qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style and technical virtuosity…’* The Cyberdelia Collective wants work that touches the virtual and transforms the actual. We want art that is not only imbued with meaning, innovation, style, technical virtuosity, but also art that Does something. We ask not that you change the world, but we do ask you for art that changes something, even if all it changes is us.
The aesthetics of Hackers (1995) that we want are camp, maximalism, collectivity, community, desire, ecodefense, fluidity, anti-normativity, blading it up, hacking with your boyfriends, turning technologies of profit, surveillance, and discipline against themselves and their operators. We want your fucked up word art, your techno-comics, your computerized exhibitions, your experiments, your collaborations, your digi-translations, your cyber-gardens⁺, whatever.
Cybermail it to editors at cyberdelia dot earth.
If you’re a real hacker you can parse that.
*Steven Levy, Hackers 1984
⁺If you send us a cybergarden you get a kiss on the mouth
all work in Cyberdelia is licensed through Creative Comrades