What is hacking, exactly...? 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 here? The Hacking Module is a new postgraduate course developed for the MA Transversal Design programme at HGK, featuring one of the 5 core threads which define transversal design as an emerging field which grows community infrastructures for worlds in transition - rehearsing, documenting, publishing, processing... and hacking. This course invites a joyful reclamation of the socio-technical practices of hacking, as a means of (re)worlding in 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).

In playful resistance, we explore the possibilities of hacking for systems change. 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 - whilst inviting F/LOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source) alternatives to Big Tech. 

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Sample sessions:
- Festival hacking - Hack the Promise edition - a festival which explores hacking imaginations.
- Culture hacking, exploiting the cracks - Situationist International, culturejamming, 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