The New York City art elite may be unaware of a cultural phenomenon boiling right under their noses: "Silicon Alley" (as opposed to the West Coast's Silicon Valley) is the going name for New York's burgeoning technology community, a combination of home-office programmers, start-up businesses, venture capitalists, and cheerleading groupies who have given rise to such Internet giants as Foursquare and Tumblr. But a little bit of Silicon Alley made its way to Chelsea last weekend with an Art Hack Weekend hosted jointly by new media space Eyebeam and The Creators Project (the latter being an international collaboration between Vice and Intel that has produced new-media-focused events and exhibitions around the world, documenting their work on an authoritative blog).

The event was deemed a "hackathon," a bit of nomenclature that also might be unfamiliar for art world audiences. Something between a business conference, social gathering, and pop-up happening, hackathons gather hundreds of techies in one room to work on whatever projects they so desire, drawing ad-hoc teams out of the crowd at hand. Most hackathons work toward a specific end: creating usable applications for public government data, solving the problems of digital journalism, or making the next great iPhone game. The events generally end in a series of demonstrations, allowing teams to show off their hard work. Prizes are often awarded to the best or most promising demos. The other award is publicity — hackathons are public opportunities to strut your stuff, and maybe win the eye of an investor or two.

So, given the hackathon's current reputation as a locus for rampant networking, showboat grandstanding, and elevator pitches, what does an art hackathon look like?

A diverse crowd of 50 designers, programmers, technologists, and artists gathered at Eyebeam for the Art Hack Weekend's opening meet-and-greet on Friday, August 5, the communal atmosphere heightened by the rough-and-tumble vibe of Eyebeam's garage workspace. After short introductions by Creators Project global editor Julia Kaganskiy and Eyebeam associate director of learning and engagement Stephanie Pereira, art hackathon participants introduced themselves one by one, citing their skills (Ruby on Rails, Java, iPhone development) and their project ideas. Programmers formed the majority of the crowd, though artists were in evidence by their more traditional skill sets. But then it has become increasingly irrelevant to set a line between "artist" and "technologist," with artists working in the medium of technology as others work in paint.

The seeds of teams formed as the crowd mingled. Groups that convened on Saturday at 10 a.m. sharp worked till midnight, and returned on Sunday to finish up before demonstrations in the evening. The frazzled teams watched each others' demos; most were carried off successfully, but even the to-be-expected glitches met with enthusiastic applause.

"Dis-Kinect," by Ahmad Saeed, Ronald Ang Siy, James Donovan, Mario Gonzalez, Jonathan Landau, Eric Stallworth and Guojiam Wu, used the eponymous Xbox Kinect controller to detect a team member's movement, echoing the movements with a stuffed animal that was rigged up marionette-style with motors. The project demonstrated "how actions in the real world are distorted by actions in the digital world" of social media, explained Landau (who also runs the iPhone-based Artseeka). "Prismatweet," by Bernardo Schor, Sutian Dong, and Vijay Selvaraj, created a live Twitter visualization that turned the world's output of tweets into grids of colored dots filtered by selected search terms.

The two winning projects selected by the Art Hack Weekend's panel of judges were "Dis-Kinect" and "Free Fall High Score," an "antagonistic" iPhone application directed by artist James George and created with Logan Best, Michael Zick Doherty, Helen Mair, Maria Mendez, Juan C. Müller, and Caitlin Morris. The app rewards users for dropping their smartphones (safely) from the highest height possible, recording video and counting time as the $400 piece of plastic tumbles to the ground. The winners received a $2,500 development stipend, 8 weeks of studio space at Eyebeam, and the chance to debut their final works at The Creators Project's New York event coming up in October, in conjunction with The Creators Project's Studio program.  

The Art Hack Weekend was successful in separating itself from the tech market-driven aspects of the usual hackathon — the point wasn't the grants, or the space. It was the act of creating. "Most hackathons are focused on building that next billion dollar app or startup, and even when they're not, they still feel very corporatized. It can start to feel like a sales pitch," Kaganskiy wrote to me in an email. "We made a conscious choice not to go that route." Still, not all of the projects reached the level of art for art's sake; some were content with presenting a flashy bit of technology very much at home with the standard hackathon. "The teams being led by artists just had concepts that were so much more complex, interesting and elegant," Kaganskiy wrote.

Art Hack Weekend's best work, "Free Fall High Score" and "Dis-Kinect" in particular, moved beyond technology to engage artistic ideas of the interaction between artist and viewer, using art to disrupt the audience's normal relationship with technology, and with the world around them.

INTERNET ALCHEMY: Rhizome has an artist profile of Duncan Malashock that begins with an interesting nugget of inspiration. Malashock's "Glass Bead Game," a video-based performance, is based on the Herman Hesse novel of the same name, which explores the idea of a game that synthesizes different cultural practices — math, science, art, music. Malashock and Rhizome editor Joanne McNeil explore how the Internet might provide a medium for such a synthesis.

THE NAMING OF THINGS: In an interview with Web site Software and Art, artist Julian Oliver discusses the separation between artists and programmers. Asked if there is a "clear separation between artists and engineers/technicians" in his production team, Oliver responds emphatically, "No. I thoroughly dislike such partitioning.... These separations are artificial and I believe point to an aging class model deeply sewn throughout the fine arts, of the 'Visionary' and the 'Hired-hand.'" When speaking about "new media" art, vocabulary is an unresolved sticking point. Should we even call someone a new media artist? Simply an artist? We must continue to dissect these inherent biases and question what the roles of artist and producer actually mean in such collaborative forms of art.

Net Work is a weekly column exploring the state of contemporary new media art and its practitioners by ARTINFO Assistant Editor Kyle Chayka. Follow Kyle on Twitter at @chaykak or email him at kchayka@artinfo.com.