Art, Open Hardware and DIY Culture

This lecture will review the reflexive and critic capabilities of the artistic practices that use open hardware and DIY (Do it yourself) as production methodologies.

Hardware development, as an artistic practice, offers an alternative way of production, becoming symptom of tension and conflict in the relationship between art
and technology. From this position, artist seeks through his own production processes to find paths from where establish a critical discourse respect the actual technical progress and its transformations.

The appropiation of diverse kind of electronic devices, like Circuit Bending and Open Hardware practices do, manifests a little complacent consciousness respect of the High Art and Neoliberal Capitalism logics. Still insert in science and technology domain, therefore under its own rules, fields, methods and knowledges, these practices reformulate continuously the meaning and the sense of the use of technologies, either in the field of Art as in everyday life.

Actually, many artists, musicians and designers experiment with DIY methodologies for developing their projects, alternating with procedures derived from electronics and hybrid practices as Circuit Bending and Hardware Hacking. All these practices have a significative relationship with artistic operations as appropriation, collage, bricollage or recycling. Is mainly the independent and experimental music scene who cast a production stage wishful of these kind of practices, where many musical proposals configure their own sounds and languages.

Certainly, the multiple research processes that are taking place today with the formalization of Open Hardware and DIY practice make possible to artists and researchers the acquiring of wider, and many times better, instruments for their creative processes.

In a trend that consolidates even more strength these instruments are also tools, both for a self-sufficiency in the production, as for control and self-empowerment of technology.