| Year | 2020–2026 |
Consensual Hacking is a zine/workbook and participatory performance workshop in which participants consider what it would take to carefully and consensually enter each other's computers. Treating consent as a shared grammar between bodies and machines, the project asks what it means to responsibly give and take access and control to our most intimate digital spaces.
The workshop proposes a ritual in which participants may opt in or out of simultaneously hacking into one another's computers. Through networking tools, writing, contracts, and conversation, participants negotiate desire, boundaries, trust, and mutual risk. The possibility of hacking becomes a way to explore the stakes of giving another person access to something deeply personal, and what it means to step into the unknown together.
The work brings together performance, pedagogy, and live technical practice, treating the network as a physical and social space. Bodies and devices occupy the same room, connected through cables, wireless signals, protocols, and agreements. These connections form an architecture of intimacy and vulnerability, where technological access is inseparable from the social relationships that make it possible.
Rather than using technology as spectacle, Consensual Hacking creates the conditions for shared risk, offering the possibility of connection, intimacy, intensity, beauty, and poetry. It asks how we might enter the unknown with another, and how artistic practice can create more thoughtful, loving, and politically alive relationships to the digital systems that shape our lives.
