Decolonial Hacker

Decolonial Hacker is an intervention into the digital territory of cultural institutions

Decolonial Hacker critically examines cultural institutions, their alliances, interests and behaviour. Born of a desire to entrench more consistent and collective engagement with institutional critique, Decolonial Hacker operates through a web browser extension that “hacks” institutions’ URLs with commissioned criticism, and an online platform that archives these texts. The extension activates when a user logs onto an institution’s website, dissolving their webpage to reveal an article that analyses certain problematics of that place informed by decolonial politics at large – for instance, pillaged colonial objects, funding sources and labour conditions. By intervening in the digital territory of institutions and building a dedicated space where discussions about their actions can exist, we hope for more people to actively imagine and posit better alternatives for institutional governance. Here, at the beginning, it’s difficult to be doctrinal as to what Decolonial Hacker will do in its lifetime, for we are certainly open to deviations along the way. Decolonial Hacker is at its core a community driven initiative, and we aspire to join the growing chorus of people acting and thinking in good faith to conceive of what a “better institution” might look like, in an industry that is constantly reproducing systems of domination. Decolonial Hacker was produced with funding from the Australia Council for the Arts. The extension overlays critical writing onto a set of defined websites. It is otherwise inactive. The set of URLs that trigger the Decolonial Hacker experience is updated approximately every 30 minutes in a background script. Decolonial Hacker can be disabled and reactivated through selecting “HIDE” on the extension’s pop-down menu.