Cybergroups seek to expose social injustice. So do graffiti and performance artists
By N.S.
WHEN Donald Trump stated that he wanted to stop Muslims from entering America, Anonymous, a cybergroup, responded by hacking his website. They disabled the Trump Towers site, and posted a video on YouTube asking Mr Trump to think before he speaks. In June, they hacked 250 Facebook and Twitter accounts associated with Islamic State (IS), replacing jihadist messages and images with LGBT rainbow flags and pro-gay slogans. “Hello World. It’s time I share with you a little secret…I’m Gay and I’m Proud!!” read one. “#GayPride.”
Anonymous, whose trademark has become the Guy Fawkes mask, said the hack was a way to pay homage to the 49 people who died in the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. The initiator of the hack, who goes by the pseudonym WauchulaGhost, said that he received messages of support as well as death threats from extremists. Some sent him photographs of beheaded corpses with the message “You’re next”. The social justice warriors have attracted attention across the globe after helping Arab Spring activists during the 2011 internet blackout in Egypt with their Speak2Tweet campaign, and attacking credit card companies after they refused to process payments to WikiLeaks. But today—as a vigilant statement on free speech—is hacktivism a form of contemporary art?
Hactivism takes its cues from confrontational performance art such as that of the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist artists who have been fighting sexism in the art world since 1985. Wearing gorilla masks to stage unannounced performances, they famously created a public billboard in New York that read “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” Hacktivists also strike a chord with the Russian art group Pussy Riot, who stormed a Moscow church in 2012 to perform “Punk Prayer”, a protest song against Vladimir Putin. The opening lyrics cry “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin Banish Putin, Banish Putin!” Both groups offer the same kind of stormy activism as Anonymous, only theirs takes place offline.
The way that Anonymous provoke and poke fun at their targets is also reminiscent of Saint Hoax, an Instagram artist, and his political satire videos. In these minute-long animations, Donald Trump and Barack Obama are transformed into speechless drag queens. The Anonymous YouTube channel, a place for robotic-voiced broadcasts by a mask-wearing spokesperson, comes across like video art—specifically the lo-fi aesthetic of Nam June Paik’s videos from the 1960s or even the surrealist short films of Salvador Dalí.
But perhaps Anonymous’s closest kinship is with Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident artist. As part of his “Sichuan Earthquake Names Project”, Mr Ai published the names of 5,335 students who died in the 2008 earthquake on his blog—names which the Chinese government had refused to release. Shortly after doing so, his blog was shut down. In 2011, he was arrested and jailed for 81 days without charge.
The bold voice of hacktivists collides and overlaps with those of graffiti artists. When GlobalHell, a group of hackers from the 1990s, hacked the websites of the White House and the US Post, they were in a way working as graffiti artists. Sprawling “Global hell will not die” on the American army website invited comparisons to spray paint. Indeed, the work of GlobalHell is not unlike the political street art led by Banksy. His graffiti draws attention to discrimination and international crises; last year, he painted a mural of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, in a refugee camp in Calais to highlight the fact Jobs’s father was a Syrian immigrant. In 2008, he wrote “One Nation Under CCTV” in London. In 2010, an even more potent message: “If at first you don’t succeed—call an airstrike.”
Hacktivists are as controversial as some artists, sparking conversations about injustice. But as they become more mainstream, some say their desire for popularity is overtaking their ability to take action. Has a polished image replaced web activists’ ability to solve real problems? Could they be helping more people, rather than asking for more likes?
If a graffiti artist starts with spraypaint and a performance artist with their body, then the hacktivist starts with injustice. Perhaps hacktivist groups should be seen as new art collectives, armed with unified branding and an artistic palette of code, links and graphics. The only difference is that their message is not conveyed in installations or paint, but from behind a mask.
