Discourse
Our pirates are an error to patriarchy. Transhackcyberfeminism. Building circuits of creative resistance. A sea of possibilities lies ahead of us. Digital spheres free from existing power relations. Open source systems and peer production. The bypass of conventional media infrastructures. Bodies and bubbles. „We have found the place for our rituals, we had dreamed it, written it in science fiction.“ (cf. Transhackfeminist manifesto, Pechblenda)
Daniel Heller-Roazen describes the law- and stateless historical figure of the pirate as an enemy of all that falls outside all territorial, political, martial and legal categories: Because they could not be dealt with by the usual law, they are not a citizen of a state and they move on the open sea that belongs to no one and where no laws apply.
From the perspective of artistic research, piracy refers to the exploration of gray zone areas and liminal social heterotopias. These realized utopias and counter-worlds described by Michel Foucault, function according to their own rules. Their otherness harbors emancipatory potential. The ship – Foucault’s heterotopia par excellence – serves us as a vivid metaphor from which to send out an emergency signal to our allies and partners in crime: MAYDAY! RECLAIM EVERYTHING!
« […] We define hacking neither as virtuosity nor as a phenomenon limited to the practices and politics of computers, but rather as a tactic for cultural counter-intelligence: an engaged and collective process of enablement and creative resistance, a form of public amateurism, a method of improvisation, experimental pedagogy, and self-organised criticality. » – Pirate Cultures, 2024
Literature / References
Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity, London 2025
Daniel Heller-Roazen, Der Feind aller. Der Pirat und das Recht, Frankfurt/M. 2010
Lukas Kaelin, Andreas Telser und Ilaria Hoppe (Ed.), Bubbles & Bodies – Neue Öffentlichkeiten zwischen sozialen Medien und Straßenprotesten, Linz/Bielefeld 2021
Michel Foucault, Die Heterotopien/Der utopische Körper. Les hétérotopies/Les corps utopiques, zweisprachige Ausgabe, übers. von Michael Bischoff, Frankfurt/M. 2005
Isabell Lorey, Governmental Precarization, online: transversal texts, jan 2011
Isabell Lorey, Figuren des Immunen. Elemente einer politischen Theorie, Zürich 2011
Judith Butler, Anmerkungen zu einer performativen Theorie der Versammlung, Aus dem Amerikanischen von Frank Born, Berlin 2016
Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism, Routledge, London 2011
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? Postkolonialität und subalterne Artikulation, übers. v. Alexander Joskowicz u. Stefan Nowotny, mit einer Einleitung v. Hito Steyerl, Turia + Kant, Wien 2007 (Original: 1988)
Danae, What is hacktivism? The artist as hacker in the digital age, in: Medium, Nov 9/2022
Donna Haraway, Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, in: Socialist Review 80/1985, p. 65–108
Anna Lena Berscheid, Ilona Horwath und Birgitt Riegraf, Einleitung. Cyborgs revisited: Zur Verbindung von Geschlecht, Technologien und Maschinen, in: Feministische Studien 37/2019, 2, p. 241–249