Cultures of Making and Relating
blog.khinsen.net
blog.khinsen.net
I wrote about this a fair bit as a party of my master's thesis, about tinkering as being a "conversation" with materials. Hacking can absolutely be looked at in this framework.
The philosopher Donald Schön I think was the first person to formulate tinkering in that way. The process of engaging with materials -- whether it's a broken motor you're curious about or a tune you're plucking out as a complete novice or some code on Scratch -- involves asking questions of the materials, learning to hear answers, and noticing when the materials themselves pose questions. It's a really nice way of looking at things.
Maybe the chatbot can reproduce variations on technical artifacts with similar formal characteristics as the Candy Crush game. But the reproductions don’t come with the essence of what made it important: its cultural novelty, the whimsy of its graphics, the freshness of its addictive mechanism, its arrival when people had smartphones and were fishing around for what to do with them, the fact that everybody else was discovering it along with you (and talking about that fact), its timing before its competitors dialed in even more potent attention sinks…
“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
I can make a photo or video with my phone camera anywhere, anytime, and I can do so essentially for free, in essentially unlimited quantity. Then Sean Baker turns around and makes Tangerine with his iPhone 5S… and if anything, I’m even more sensitized to the way good photography has something above and beyond what I’m doing.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [0] comes to mind.
That sounds like relating to me- but who wouldn't think of a hacker as a paradigm maker. So perhaps hacker straddles the two: both making and relating?