The Los Angeles Art and Technology Hackers Club

When I was in graduate school at Cal Arts I started doing work that required some basic skills in electronics. I had been using computers in my work for years, but I had no experience in real electronics – soldering, circuit design and so forth. I found the initial learning curve very steep, and I wasn’t aware of a lot of resources for getting started. A couple artists who I knew, Don Han and Eddo Stern, had done some electronics work before and they helped me figure some stuff out, but it took me a couple years of helpless fumbling before I felt like I knew anything at all. After I graduated and c-level was started (a new media collective that I’m a member of) I decided that I wanted to teach a class in basic electronics – in essence to help the people that were stuck where I had been a couple of years earlier. The reception was very positive, and c-level continues to offer occasional classes. This year I decided that I wanted to do more, but I didn’t want to do more work, so I started the Hacker club. The idea is that if you bring together people who are interested in the same thing, they’ll teach each other, especially if you provide cookies and/or beer. I thought it would be a good way to provide support to what I saw as a growing subset artists who wanted to use technology in their work, and I wanted the pleasure of a meeting people in person instead of over email.

The meeting are very casual; my friend Tom Jennings and I run them - typically we'll have a couple of people demonstrate projects they are working on, and the rest of the time is dedicated to impromptu problem solving, napkin scribbling, and idle chit chat.

Ideologically, I think teaching people electronics is more important now than it’s ever been. Corporations posses an ever growing array of legal tools (DMCA etc) that are continually being used to dictate how people are allowed to use the technology they’ve purchased. Modifying technology to serve your needs becomes forbidden. Laws against reverse engineering make this stricture explicit. When power is controlled thorough the application and access to technology, it’s critical that people not be cowed by the complexities of electronics. In the hacker club, we’re attempting to reassert our right to understand the underlying technical forces of a communication and information based economy.