20 Facts About McKenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark was born on 1961 and is an Australian-born writer and scholar.

McKenzie Wark's best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.

McKenzie Wark is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.

McKenzie Wark received a bachelor's degree from Macquarie University in 1985, a Master's from the University of Technology, Sydney in 1990 and received a PhD in communications from Murdoch University in 1998.

In 1995, McKenzie Wark had an affair with novelist Kathy Acker.

In 1997, McKenzie Wark met artist Christen Clifford in Williamsburg, New York.

In 2017, McKenzie Wark started her gender transition, and began taking hormones in 2018.

Between 2018 and 2022, McKenzie Wark primarily wrote articles and commissioned pieces, and became involved with queer and trans rave scenes in Brooklyn.

In Virtual Geography, published in 1994, McKenzie Wark offers a theory of what she calls the 'weird global media event'.

In two subsequent books, The Virtual Republic, published in 1997, and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace, McKenzie Wark turned her attention to the national cultural space of Australia.

McKenzie Wark developed an approach based on participant observation, but adapted to the media sphere.

McKenzie Wark describes the process of culture by which "the jolt of new experiences becomes naturalised into habit" or second nature and describes the information society as not being new but something that changes through culture the balance between space binding and time binding media.

McKenzie Wark further describes the concept of "third nature" or telesthesia, where devices such as television and the telephone create a platform which we use to communicate to people over large distances and not just a machine that we learn to operate individually.

McKenzie Wark travelled the world with a GPS device and recorded observations at particular times and coordinates.

In 2004 McKenzie Wark published her best known work, A Hacker Manifesto.

McKenzie Wark argues that these vectoralists have imposed the concept of property on all physical fields, but now the new vectoralists lay claim to intellectual property, a field that is not bound by scarcity.

In Gamer Theory McKenzie Wark argues that in a world that is increasingly competitive and game-like, computer games are a utopian version of the world, because they actually realise the principles of the level playing field and reward based on merit that is elsewhere promised but not actually delivered.

McKenzie Wark pays particular attention to often-neglected figures and works in the SI, including the utopian architectural projects of Constant, the painting of Giuseppe Pinot, The Situationist Times of Jacqueline de Jong and the novels of Michele Bernstein.

At The New School, Professor McKenzie Wark teaches seminars on the Situationist International, the Militarized Vision lecture, as well as Introduction to Cultural Studies.

At the theoretical level, McKenzie Wark's writing can be seen in the context of three currents: British Cultural Studies, German Critical Theory and French Poststructuralism.