Hack the Space

We challenged 140 artists to make art from data. Here’s what they created.

In June 2014, more than 140 artists gathered in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to take part in Hack The Space. Each team had 24 hours to create a new digital artwork.

Hackers were given the brief ‘take any data and turn it into art.’ They could choose from unusual datasets from Tate, the Open Data Institute, The Guardian and Ai Weiwei, who donated a recording of himself reading aloud the names of the 5,196 children who died in 2008’s Sichuan earthquake when faulty school buildings collapsed on them.

In 24 hours, the hackers created 40 new works of art. The top three projects won cash prizes and development funding from The Space. They were:

1st Prize: $echo by Guy Armitage, Ron Herrema, Gavin Clark and Marko Kirves, which visualised the constant attacks on users’ online security and questioned the reasons behind them.

2nd Prize: Perspective by Robert Wollner and Adam John Williams, which used projection mapping, speech synthesis and computer animation to explore how the source that we receive information from can change the way we think about it.

3rd Prize: The Glasshouse, by Tom Berman, Tomas Ruta, Emil Wallner, Charlotte Webb and Matthew Gardiner, which explored the economy of artistic labour by outsourcing the brief to low-paid internet workers.

The event was managed by 3beards, which gave each team a mentor to guide them through the process. Two Oscar-winning digital masters opened the Hack with keynote speeches, and The Space launched its first Open Call, giving anyone aged 18 or over the chance to submit an original idea for a new digital artwork.

About this artist

Hack the Space was hosted by The Space and managed by 3Beards.