cliff hammett

Cliff Hammett is a critical maker, a new media meddler and a technical tinkerer. His investigations take place at the junctures between ecological, technical and social concerns. These experiments generate works and events that open up challenging issues and phenomena to a range of participants and publics. Cliff works across media and practices, employing hardware design, software development, illustration, poetry, walking events and co-making workshops.

Collaboration is key to Cliff’s work. In 2011, he and fellow researcher Alexandra Jønsson received an Award of Distinction in the Prix Ars Electronica for x_msg, an SMS-based sex work activist telephony system developed with the x:talk project. He has subsequently worked with Alexandra and a range of other practitioners, as core members of the collectives Open System Association and Autonomous Tech Fetish, and has contributed to multiple titles published by collaborative press Sidekick Books.

Cliff holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Practice from the University of Sussex. His thesis project, Nightsniffing, combined live walking events and bespoke data devices to open up the relationship between bat ecology and the systems that underlie urban change and contestation.