A month-long takeover over the Barbican’s public foyer spaces in August, 2013. The programme was a significant departure from how arts activity at the Barbican was usually programmed - there was no central curation or commissioning.
Instead, curatorial, programming and production decisions were shaped by those who turned up to weekly-organising meetings (usually on Tuesday evenings) over the course of a year beforehand.
The project was non-hierarchical, with no single lead. Its two key instigators — those who created the initial conditions with the germ of an idea and the permissions it required — were Leonora Thomson (then my boss, and Director of Audiences at the Barbican) and Charles Armstrong (founder of the Trampery).
The art writer Laura Davison set up a platform for critical writing in response to Hack the Barbican, and wrote:
By post 12 I suppose I should have some additional commentary that may somehow contextualise Hack the Barbican. However, I don’t actually know where to begin. Not knowing where to begin is a Hack the Barbican beginning. Minimal parameters are Hack the Barbican parameters. The decision for no central curatorial policy has meant my own commentary has been given these seemingly limitless boundaries. I have been proactive in seeking the HTB community out but, more than anything I’ve let the anarchic nature of the event dictate how I encounter projects to write about. At first I thought this was professional laziness but, in retrospect I had no choice. Sometimes I feel more like a visitor than I do a participant. Being in this position, where the writer has chosen to provide discourse, is an odd place of decided interloper. I need to engage but, not too much. This is hard when there are scant curatorial guidelines. There is no edge to Hack the Barbican where I can dip my toes or even hit my head. Instead, I’ve come up with the strategy of residing in a fixed place (Penthouse 4C, this may now change). I wait for conversations and work to appear organically. I’ve relied on other people for introductions. I’ve been alerted to interesting projects on Twitter. I’ve followed up some preemptive research on participants to guide who I contact. I’ve looked at Lanyrd and chased up. In the beginning I started out with a question for participants about the reimagination of HTB as a another system or space. Somehow that question has been lost in amongst discussions about work and the meaning of hacking, so I want to resurrect it now. For me, if HTB was a structure it would be Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi building in Rome. A space with different pockets or views depending on how you encounter it, a whole that you can never perceive in its entirety. The dissolution of overview is both at once fascinating and frustrating. This labyrinth space is the essence of Hack the Barbican.
As an art writer, Hack the Barbican has revealed how I overwhelming receive cultural events within London’s most prominent cultural institutions as a formula. An obvious curatorial formula and an institutional spatial formula. This is not a revelatory observation but, it is a feeling that has been agitated over the past 3 weeks. If I go to see a temporary exhibition at Tate Modern, I could probably shut my eyes from the moment I leave Southwark tube and walk to, around, within and out of the institution without misplacing a step. There are loose defined spaces for occurrences during the Hack the Barbican but, not in the same way that there is in either Tate for temporary exhibits and performances. As a cultural nerd that strikes sheer pulling-the-sheets-over-head terror in me. Hack the Barbican is perhaps like any platform for sharing on the web (maybe that is a too reductive or an obvious remark). It’s anarchic and wide ranging like YouTube or Reddit or Gawker. There are popular posts, there are posts that are private, there are propositions for learning, there are posts that refer to themselves and forget about the platform they are viewed from, there are unvisited posts, there are posts belonging to structured channels, there are posts that serve no discernable purpose, there are posts looking for monetary investment. The intention of content on these platforms goes on forever, as does the intention of projects at HTB. True neverending intention is kryptonite for art critics. As art begins to take on these structures prevalent in the rest of society, navigating this particular brand of chaos has to become our forte in this era.
Also worth reading are Lloyd Davis’s thoughts, written in the immediate aftermath:
This is the really cool thing – we, a rag-tag bunch who barely knew each other a few months ago, ran a fringe-like festival, largely without pay and largely without experience of doing something on this scale before, we did it and nothing bad happened, the building didn’t collapse, the fountains weren’t running with blood. There were many times when I thought that it just wasn’t going to happen or else it was going to be really shit. It happened and it wasn’t shit.