{"id":2552,"date":"2015-03-17T12:41:50","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T12:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/about.zealous-solutions.com\/?p=2552"},"modified":"2025-09-12T14:11:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T14:11:40","slug":"zealous-guy-armitage-wins-first-place-at-hack-the-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/news\/zealous-guy-armitage-wins-first-place-at-hack-the-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Founder Wins Tate Modern&#8217;s Hack the Space"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Zealous\u2019 founder Guy Armitage won first place with his team of fellow hackers at Saturday\u2019s &#8216;Hack the Space&#8217;, a 24-hour event held at Tate Modern\u2019s Turbine Hall to mark the launch of &#8216;The Space&#8217;, a free online platform for digital art. Described as \u2018The world\u2019s biggest art hack\u2019, the hackathon\u2019s 140 participants were given a brief to turn data into a work of art in just 24 hours. They were given access to unusual data sets provided by Tate, the Guardian, and the Open Data Institute, among others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-vimeo wp-block-embed-vimeo wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"$echo\" src=\"about:blank\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" class=\"lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/99773187?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>&#8220;We wanted to make people aware of online security&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Armitage\u2019s team came up with \u2018$echo\u2019, a site project that produced the name of one of the thousands of victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake every time a Chinese hacker hacked the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8216;We wanted to make people aware of online security and challenge their perspective of hacking by enabling people to hack into us,\u2019 Armitage explained. \u2018We let people hack into us, and every time they hacked the site, it would play a musical note depending on how bad the hack was.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The project\u2019s site received 70,000 hacks in just 20 hours: &#8216;What\u2019s fascinating is it sounded like a heart beat, we were constantly being hacked.&#8217;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Armitage and his three partners noticed the frequent attacks by Chinese hackers to their site. \u2018Every time we got attacked by China, we saw it as an act of rebellion against the Chinese government,\u2019 he said. \u2018So we gave them a name of one the thousands who had died in Sichuan\u2019s earthquake, enabling the hacker to reclaim a name.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The aim of the project was to show another side of hacking. Normally painted as a negative act on online security, hacking can also be viewed as a form of challenging a state\u2019s suppression of information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>&#8220;It sounded like a heart beat, we were constantly being hacked&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2018We wanted to challenge why people hack,\u2019 he explained, adding that the project was inspired by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, who has an interactive piece at the Space. \u2018The essence of the project is against government repression.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Armitage\u2019s team \u2013 which included generative artist Ron Herrema, developer Marko Samuli Kirves, and Gavin Clark, head of Flash at Special Moves \u2013 had 24 hours to come up with the project. None of them knew each other, and none of them had coded together before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2018$echo\u2019 came in first place at Hack the Space, winning a \u00a34,000 grant to further research the concept, as well as the possibility of working with Tate Modern in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Second place went to a 3D projection of Barak Obama\u2019s face with Vladimir Putin\u2019s speech, proving that all politicians sound alike. Other notable projects included a child\u2019s windmill that moved according to the data it received, and a robotic lobster that read depressing tweets out loud. Click here for coverage by The Guardian. The story was also featured by Forbes, in the following article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>More about this project on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thespace.org\/commission\/hack-the-space\/\" title=\"\">The Space press-release<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our founder&#8217;s team won first place at Saturday\u2019s &#8216;Hack the Space&#8217;, a 24-hour event held at Tate Modern\u2019s Turbine Hall. Described as \u2018The world\u2019s biggest art hack\u2019, the hackathon\u2019s 140 participants were given a brief to turn data into a work of art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":27386,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-news","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zealous.co\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}