Brian W. Carver -- Share Alike

Hack/Mod Art at Whitney Biennial

Making good use of my spring break, I visited New York City last Saturday and went to the Whitney Biennial. There were a number of interesting pieces, but the geek in me was most intrigued by two hacks/game mods on display.

The first was a Mario Bros. cartridge hacked to remove everything but the clouds. The artist's web site is very interesting as he explains carefully how he did this, giving the source code, which is in hex. At the Whitney the clouds were projected onto two walls in all their 8-bit glory and a stereo in the corner played a familiar Mario Bros. tune.

Also of interest was the demo of Velvet-Strike which is "counter-military graffiti for Counter-Strike." As you may know, Counter-Strike is a popular first-person shooter game that people play online in a massively multi-player environment. Velvet-Strike explains how you can put anti-war graffiti on the walls, ceilings, or floors in the game. Other online players will then be able to see these sprays. It's less of a "hack" because it is accomplished by replacing a default graphic file with one of the alternative sprays provided on the Velvet-Strike site. One spray of interest depicts two Counter-Strike soldiers embracing. Also on the site are "Intervention Recipes" that describe various ways people can collaborate to thwart the purposes of the game.

There may have been other hack art at the Whitney that I missed, as my friends and I were short on time and went through each floor in about a half-hour.

This type of art raises interesting legal issues. Hacking a Mario cartridge that is your personal property is probably legal, although it just might violate the terms of service. I can imagine similar hacks that might circumvent copy controls in violation of the DMCA. Velvet-Strike might also violate the terms of service for using the Counter-Strike servers. If anyone has a pointer to these TOS or if people are aware of more such art, please provide a link in the comments section. I'd greatly enjoy finding out about more of this kind of thing.

Posted by Brian at March 26, 2004 06:53 AM | TrackBack