André Kong

Hack Circus: A theatre for the post-tragic condition of subverted capitalist technologies

The Hack Circus is a post-tragic critique of current technologies, which are masking real climate change under the guise of a seamless, virtually augmented, continuum of trivial delights. Reacting to a digitally ‘media-ted’ surveillance society, Hack Circus proposes a radical, social-libertarian, self-sustainable community, leveraging itself off existing hardware, hacking ‘alternatives,’ unlocking their full potential and going beyond the narrow limitations of ecological design towards a wider ecological ontology.

Mashing the subversive model of Burning Man festival and the formative role of Hackspaces, together with the belief that escape is only possible through an offensive system reset, the ‘Ad-hackers’ (a group of tinkerers who redefine the possibilities of existing technology), leave London for the water. Here the first crowd-funded Hackfest (the annual hackathon event) is hosted in its germinal amphitheatre and from it THE CIRCUS IS BORN. As the alienated community grows and floats down the Thames, ties with power structures, ideology and the obsolete value system of the city are gradually severed until it sets itself free, beyond territorial waters and, in an act of ‘sousveillance,’ taps into a submarine Internet cable in the North Sea.

The Hack Circus is potentially the first node in a wider global network of linked hacker-maker communities. Set within a dialogue of bottom-up and top-down design, the architecture of the Circus is hackable, adaptive and augmentable; it is receptive, open-source, and resilient.