This is something I wrote a year ago but figured I would republish it for a new audience.

 

 ”Reality hacking is an artistic practice that takes emerges from the intersection of hacking and hacker culture, contemporary art, activism, and net culture. Reality hacking takes as its basis a broad, phenomenological point of view of the world,
and considers (often unorthodox) investigations into everyday
objects and situations a meaningful way of probing into the working of varied social contexts”

   We live in accelerated times. There are moments that time speeds up around you too fast and you realize you have gone days without creating or doing anything meaningful. Its all we can do at times not to breathe into a brown paper bag in the vain hope that the anxiety of this post modern world doesn’t overwhelm us.

   For years I have been simultaneously intrigued and repelled by the growing interconectedness of technology. Most of us can clearly visualize a world without DVRs, Ipods, email, Youtube, cellphone and texting. We have lived in that world. However thatis a thing of the past, a moment that will never be recreated without an intentional desire to do so. Over the years I have run the gamut of embracing tech and tech culture and then fleeing and deliberately working with people that shunned that aspect of our world. Right now I am on the cusp of diving full force back into the wired culture.

   Its the spiritual and psychological effect that these things have on us that most captures my attention. We stand now on the precipice of huge social change. Its been happening for awhile but seems now people are becoming more aware of this. For instance as I type this I am listening to news from England and when I push “post this blog” Over one hundred of you will read this. The paradigm has shifted and communication has become both instant and completely democratic on the net. This is the first time in history that for free I can address more than one person in more than one state all at once. Before this blog becomes too meta let me just state that this blows my mind.

The dream of becoming an intellectual virus has been flying around my head for years. I want to think something, say something and shift how two other people think who then will influence four others and so on and so on.

BY ENACTING CHANGE WITHIN A MICROCOSM I WILL OSTENSIVELY CHANGE THE MACROCOSM..

and that my friends is amazing.
We have the ability right now, to shift way people look at the world. Technology has been doing it with our very language. Words like “texting, googling, and upload” are used and new and lingistuically sound ways. I do little things throughout the week to test people, but I want to see their reaction. I want the feel of birth within an idea. I do things like write deep dark secrets I know on money anonymously. I write messages of hope on “Hello my name is tags” and post them around Boston. I figure out ways to communicate without words…. I videotape random items for an ongoing project

My manifesto today (for it may shift tomorrow):

Create
Deconstruct
Release
Look
Create again