Life Hacks is part of Het Nieuwe Instituut’s fellowship program around the theme of burn-out. As 2017 fellow Ramon Amaro states, “on the one hand, to ‘burn out’ is to stall, break, or become otherwise unusable. In other words, processes, procedure and participation simply stop working. On the other hand, burn-out is an opportunity to break open, promote action and catalyse change towards new structures and relations.”
Life Hacks manifests in a series of gatherings that respond to this ambivalence by exploring the approaches and techniques adopted to design or redesign life against the backdrop of growing precarity and an intensified entrepreneurial regime. Together with Silvio Lorusso, theorists, practitioners and XPUB, the Experimental Publishing program of the Piet Zwart Institute, Life Hacks looks into the tensions and releases that emerge from the constant reinvention and progressive self-optimization necessary to inhabit public and private space, manage time and productivity, and tweak one's own thoughts and feelings.