Place Hacking
URL = http://www.placehacking.co.uk/
Description
David Bollier:
"As a video about place hacking notes, it’s all about the “psychogeography of place.” It's about the desire to transcend the contrived, commercially constructed facade of the city to reach a rawer, more authentic sense of urban life. And it’s about creating a community of fellow adventurers who share in discovering and investigating secret or derelict spaces. Aficionados call such spaces T.O.A.D.S., “temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces.”
Garrett’s website, Place Hacking (tagline “Explore Everything”), does a good job of laying our his philosophy as a recreational anthropologist. Besides recounting Garrett’s adventure in climbing the Shard in bracing detail, the site features a variety of scholarly articles about his obsession with exploring the “ruins of modernity” (the title of an anthology of essays reviewed by Garrett).
Software hackers thrive on an intense sense of curiosity and adventure. So do street artists such as Shepherd Fairey and Banksy, who constitute a loose community of urban renegades motivated by their artistic passions (and ego?). Place hackers are clearly cousins of these anti-authoritarian urban subcultures. They are driven by inquisitiveness and a sense of play. They are fascinated by the past and its marks on the present, and by the fragility of human presence. They have a libertarian streak. In explaining place hacking, Garrett writes:
- The argument that I want to put forward here is that urban explorers, in the hacking tradition, hack or exploit fractures in physical architecture and social expectations in an effort to find deeper meanings and different readings in places even as they prefer process over results. This practice, rather than being strictly oppositional, is actually quite celebratory; it is a method of affecting desire through unencumbered play that creates a meld between body and city, representation and practice, explorers and place and, of course, between fellow trespassers." (http://bollier.org/place-hacking-curiosity-play-and-desire-connect)