Arts Centre Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium

The S.M.A.K. and the Vooruit Arts Centre are joining forces to overrun the town. “Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space” focuses on artists whose field of action is the ‘public space’. Unbounded and virtually unregulated, they hack into the town with unannounced interventions. Traces of this seep into the museum, where new and existing works are brought face to face with flashbacks from the seventies and nineties.

Electrified is the name under which the S.M.A.K. and Vooruit mount this biennial project. This second edition is taking up a decisive position on the crossroads of several directions in the visual arts. At the same time it will expose the friction between the areas where the two institutions operate: the S.M.A.K. in contemporary art and the Vooruit in media art, sound and performance art. In the quest for a shared ‘mentality’ in these different dynamics, the public space is taken as a common thread. In this case, the term ‘public space’ is all-embracing, without losing sight of the actual distinction between real and virtual public space.

In addition to probing the boundaries between the different fields of art and the way artists currently enter the public space, Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space is also a study of changing trends that have kept the notion of ‘public space’ in vogue for the last thirty years. In this sense, the project presents itself as a complementary triptych: sixteen artists, who operate internationally, with extremely varied backgrounds, will be showing new and existing work in the museum. More than half of them will also be undertaking actions in the town. These actions will be documented and gradually inserted into the exhibition. There is a supplementary Flashback section in which a framework for the project is provided by significant points in the quite recent history of ‘hacking public space’. This will involve the digital display of the work of about thirty artists who can count pioneering actions in the public space among their achievements. From the point of view of the plastic arts, a number of interventions from the 70s and 90s will be selected. They are closely related to, and are the predecessors of, later ephemeral public actions which were also recorded in non-artistic sectors (perhaps there more than elsewhere) as ‘Flashmob actions’. The so-called Flashmob activist entered the public space (usually unannounced) and hacked into it with temporary, interactive artistic actions. The intention was in the first place to arouse an ‘alienating’ effect in the spectator in the hope this would prompt him to engage in socially-critical reflection. This sort of rite-like development was also of some importance in media art. We can cite a number of striking actions from the mid-nineties that illustrate the ‘virtual’ shift in and broadening of the notion of ‘public space’. In recent decades this public domain has expanded infinitely with the rise and accessibility of the internet. In this sense, the term ‘hacking’ refers to the guerrilla-like nature of some actions on the internet and at the same time to the traditional, though equally clandestine ‘squatting’ in the real public space.

Electrified 02 – Hacking Public Space: practical details
Both the Flashback section and the urban interventions are presented in visual form in the S.M.A.K. and the Vooruit. The exhibition itself is in the museum. A Salon evening is also planned in the Vooruit, with talks by Alessandro Ludovico and others. He is the publisher of Neural, magazine for hacktivism and also guest curator of the historical section.

Artists: Ben Benaouisse, Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez, Amilcar Packer, Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, Dogma00, Javier Núñez Gasco, Roberta Gigante, Messieurs Delmotte, Ivan Moudov, Wilfredo Prieto, Lucas Murgida, Julius von Bismarck, Miet Warlop, Helmut Smits, Christophe Bruno, Pierre-Laurent Cassière.