What is hacking, exactly, and who practices it? Are hackers merely those who “enjoy the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software and/or hardware” (Wikipedia 2025), or is there something more going on? The Hacking Module is a new postgraduate course developed for the MA Transversal Design programme at HGK Academy of Art & Design Basel, featuring one of the 5 core practices which define transversal design as an emerging field - rehearsing, documenting, publishing, processing... and hacking. 

The Hacking course invites a joyful reclamation of the socio-technical practices of hacking for times of polycrisis. From commoning and repair to unmaking and decomposing, the DIY and DIT (Do-It-Together) legacies of hacker communities have long encouraged public experimentation with alternative futures. The rich diversity of hacker cultures has too often been omitted from mainstream technomyths of digital progress, however, which tend to orient hacking around the neoliberal innovation contexts of Silicon Valley technology moguls (Braybrooke & Jordan 2017; Braybrooke & Smith 2021).

In response and resistance, we explore the possibilities of hacking as systems change, hacking across worlds, and hacking as worlding. We invite dialogues between hacking and its many sister-traditions, including (but not limited to) repair, commoning, cracking, debugging, shanzai, jugaad, rewilding, circularity, making, unmaking, regenerating, decomposing and alchemizing. Resurfacing ancient traces from early internets along the way, we investigate what's worth salvaging, and what’s not - working with F/LOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source) alternatives to Big Tech platforms wherever possible. 

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Sample sessions:
- Festival hacking - Hack the Promise edition - a festival which explores hacking as imagination and resistance.
- Culture hacking - exploiting the cracks edition - Situationist International, culturejamming and hacktivism.
- Space hacking - Kunstmuseum edition - social production of space, power geometries, hacking from outside and from within
- Narrative hacking - meme-making edition - material semiotics, AI slop, power-knowledge and actor-network theory.
- Feral hacking - inviting non-humans to the digital banquet, letting the results go wild. Decomposing as transformation.

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"We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions and new sensations […] Whatever we hack, be it programming language, poetry, math or music, curves or colorings, we are the abstracters of new worlds.”
~ Mackenzie Wark