I just realized today that although my stay in Zurich for the Digital Art Weeks last month was super short, there's still a couple of links and projects i'd like to share with you. High on the list is the paper DIY: The Militant Embrace of Technology that documentary director, independent curator and new media artist Marcin Ramocki presented during the DAW symposium.

Marcin sees his paper as an attempt to clarify some of the theoretical issues sparked by 8 BIT, a documentary about art and video games which he created together with Justin Strawhand.

His expose dealt with cultural practices involving the subversion of consumer technology, be it hardware and software. According to Marcin, if the DIY approach in the field of fine art is almost taken for granted, it is still relatively new in the world of consumer electronics and software design.

The PDF is online, Hurray! So i'll let you enjoy that fun and smart text and will just blog a few links to make the reading easier:

A Hacker Manifesto, by McKenzie Wark.

Artistic critiques of technology:

Cell phone piano, each key on the keyboard is wired into a key on a phone so as you play, you are dialing

- when artists are actually hackers who break something they
shouldn’t be breaking, like in circuit bending. Paul Slocum’s Dot Matrix printer hacked to be a drum machine or Joe McKay’s cell phone sculptures.

- classical hack such as the early works by Cory Arcangel and Paul Davis opening and reprogramming of a Nintendo game cartridge.

- structural game works, legal game modifications and machinima. One example of re-dressing the code is SOD, a Castle Wolfenstein modification by JODI.

- re-purposed and prepared hardware such as Study for the Portrait of Internet (Static) in which Lance Wakeling, Ramocki's own Torcito Project, Alex Galloway's Prepared Playstation and Arcangel's Two Projectors, Keystoned.

Still from a video re-enactment of "E.T."

- remaking of a piece of software (and hardware), mostly retro-engineering and custom electronics. Plus, fake hacker websites, games rewritten from the ground up, alternative browsers and Hollywood movies. E.g minimal re-enactment of ET by Kara Hearn and Jamie Allen's custom 4 bit synthetiser housed in an old cigar box.

Researching a bit for a talk I'll be giving in Medellín (Colombia) next week, I came across the BLO: the Barbie Liberation Organization. A Manhattan-based group formed in 1989? who taking advantage of similarities in the voice hardware of Teen Talk Barbie and the Talking Duke G.I. Joe doll, er, “action figure,� they absconded with several hundred of each and performed a stereotype-change operation on the lot.

In the mid 1990s cultural critic Mark Dery wrote: The BLO claims to have performed corrective surgery on 300 Teen Talk Barbies and Talking Duke G.I. Joes---switching their sound chips, repackaging the toys, and returning them to store shelves. Consumers reported their amazement at hearing Barbie bellow, "Eat lead, Cobra!" or "Vengeance is mine!," while Joe chirped, "Will we ever have enough clothes?" and "Let's plan our dream wedding!".

By the creation of this hybrid (and transsexual) product, the BLO was not only disrupting stereotype codes in children minds but also offering a “good manners� example of collaborative work between rival companies such as Mattel (Barbie producers) and Hasbro (the makers of the action hero).

The BLO was an early reference of culture jamming initiatives that fostered the emergence of shopdropping (also known as reverse-shoplifting) projects later on. I would dare to say that it can be interpreted as the cultural appropriation of reverse engineering, a military strategy often used during WWII to figure out other nation’s technological information; a practice that has continued gaining attention, especially in relation to open-source philosophies.

Pictures are taken from this page that keeps the memory of the legendary group and offers a scanned copy from the original step-by-step guide to perform our own Barbie/G.I Joe home transformation.

Related: Modified Toy Orchestra makes electronic music that derives from the modification of toys; and Stelarc Ken (webpage).