What the heck? - hacking HEK
Channel: Garrett Lynch [IRL]
Date: 27/02/2019

Since 2016 HEK, the House of electronic Art, Basel have organised a net-based award for art that employs the “Internet as a platform for artistic activities”.  In addition to a jury award, an audience award is voted for online.  Votes are cast through Pinpoll, a web-based poll that is easily hacked.  The poll was hacked in 2017 with first and second places surpassing other nominations by over 1400 votes.  In 2018 HEK continued to use Pinpoll.

On 19/05/2018, the last week of voting, I deployed a clicking bot to cast votes through TorBrowser.  It arbitrarily selected one nomination to win by an exaggerated number of votes.  The intention was to confound HEK's selection process and hopefully sufficiently embarrass them to abolish the poll in coming years.  On 30/05/2018 HEK announced that the audience award had been hacked and that they intended to distribute the prize money to all nominated artists.