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 was a new postgraduate course which we developed for the MA Transversal Design programme at HGK, as 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 play and resistance, we explored the possibilities of hacking for systems change. We invited 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 investigated what is worth salvaging, and what is not - whilst inviting F/LOSS (Free, Libre, Open Source) alternatives to Big Tech along the way. 

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Sample sessions:
- Space hacking - Kunstmuseum edition - digging into the social production of space, power geometries, hacking from outside/inside.
- Narrative hacking - meme-making edition - material semiotics, AI slop & power-knowledge.
- Feral hacking - inviting non-humans to the digital banquet, watching it all go wild. Decomposing as transformation.
- Vintage web hacking - remembering the hope of the early days of world wide webs, learning how to build digital gardens, ghosts in the machine.
- Culture hacking - Exploiting the cracks with situationism, culturejamming and hacktivism.
- Festival hacking - Hack the Promise edition, a festival exploring politics of technology.

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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