MayHEM

MayHEM is a part of HAIP (Hack Act Interact Progress) a series of projects which was founded at Kiberpipa in Ljubljana in 2004. Within these project works the borders between art and hacker culture constantly blur there for links for our long-term interests to ransack cultural, technological, scientific and other resources that have similar topics such as the Linux Weeks 2009 "Art meets Radical Openness" but also „Parade“ are always present. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The acronym MayHEM refers back to regeneration, progress and to acting, interacting and hacking. The interpretation of MayHEM as a word formation points to chaos, interlocking and disarrangement as well as to the month of May. With MayHEM we are creating a crossover from chaotic to stringent event structures. We are moving Time’s Up and external events closer together in time and content and unleash our own and other potentials in a compromised way. The inspiration to this procedure came to us by looking at the event calendar of spring 2009. We recognized that within the high concentration of events additional self-contained cultural events were in danger to disappear. In short, we came to the decision to link our project plans with works and contents of other cultural performers of Linz. Partly with, partly without agreement. The course of action of MayHEM - the hacking of external events - is also rooted in the history of hacking as well as the use of a recursive acronym and the possibilities of technological reevaluations to establish new (social) systems. Constructing robots, hack laboratories, installations, workshops, concerts and performances are the subjects of content within Crossing Europe, the Linux Weeks at servus.at, of Radio FRO, the activities of the art university, Dorkbot and many events of the Cultural Capital 2009. Therefore it is a concern to us to embed MayHEM into the already existing parallel structures and contents. As a result, we are expecting a mutual fruitful cooperation respectively chances to present current developments and applied results in entirely new environments. MayHEM stretches across a time period of 12 days (end of April through the beginning of May), in which the locations of presentation are spread out across town and the participating organizers appear in new contexts under the motto of „Physical Hackings“. Within this short timeframe we are expecting a dynamic pull, which should convey an output-orientated attitude and provide the soil for continuing working processes. The manifested goal is to turn similar contents perspectively and to combine and actively knot with each other. The advantage of this approach: MayHEM hacks different locations within the events jungle, plants seeds within a line of events to harvest sweet fruits on their fertile soils for itself and an attending audience. MayHEM orientates itself along several basic ethical hacker rules: sharing, collectively using, unleashing, decentralizing and informing. Time’s Up as an example shares its workspaces and provides them along with technical expertise temporarily to the service of the general public and invites all interested parties to partake in workshops as well as to visit the several events. With the selection of the different locations as well as participation of international experts we want to provoke direct knowledge transfer. So declare and share!