Hacking The (im)material. Mike Phillips. Paul Thomas (ed). The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of New Media Art, Volume 2: Artists and Practice 1st Edition. DOI: 10.5040/9781474207959.033

‘It’s a wailing Christ’, she said. This came as some surprise because, until that moment, it had been a sonic systems-based environmental intervention. An assemblage of Perspex tubes, elasticated variable resistors, oscillators and fishing wire, Monitor (Figure 33.1) hovered, suspended at a triangulated midpoint between two trees and the ground, the breeze constantly flexing its position, causing the three speakers to emit semi-harmonious frequencies – a sonic tensegrity. Monitor (circa 1982) had its origins in a technological manifestation of the invisible forces of El Lissitzky, Naum Gabo and László Moholy-Nagy, a Vision in Motion, or at least it did in my head. The shock of realizing that it was actually a crucifixion, that the sounds were soaked in pathos and that the purity of the technological system had been tainted with religious connotation has haunted electronic and digital creative production ever since. More haunting than Liz Rhodes’s enquiry about the difference between technological hacking and a ‘schoolboy playing with balsa wood’ (although that stung a little).

Figure 33.1. Wailing Christ—Monitor (1982) by Mike Phillips. Oscillators, sprung potentiometers, speakers, Perspex tubes, monofilament. © Mike Phillips

The eye of the beholder here was the fizzing mind of Lesley Kerman, an Art (‘Hysteria’) History lecturer at Exeter College of Art and Design. She hacked my naïve wannabe systems-based brain and strategically liberated it (almost) from a reductionist approach to technology. This dichotomy, between experiences and the technologies that enable them, will be a running theme which underpins the tensions between the cultural location of new media art, technology’s relationship to cultural politics and its uneasy fit within the museums and galleries that exhibit and preserve cultural artefacts, and particularly when these artefacts are immaterial. The wailing Christ’s purist doppelganger was an example of an often naïve and positivist engagement with technology and the data it harvests or propagates which pervades our culture to the extent that the idea that there is an objective non-negotiable reality just waiting to be measured is polluting notions of cultural value, which are more to do with the valorization of the things that can be measured – something discussed further in the ‘Hacking Institutions’ section below.