Purdue Hackers is a collective of engineers & artists at Purdue who build creative technical projects—apps, websites, games, hardware electronics.
For 2 years, hackers had been developing wacky, cutting-edge projects at Hack Night, our all-night hacker festival every Friday—but none had been seen by anyone outside Hack Night.
On Sunday, December 8th, 2024, we reimagined these projects as art pieces, installed them in a real gallery in West Lafayette, Indiana, and ran a 4-hour pop-up exhibition for the public.
250 people stopped by, grabbed a badge and a mocktail, and viewed this student work, which included NFC-enabled passports, a vine-based constructed language, and a meter-tall color clock.
FEATURED WORKS
Badges
Community
⇥Colorful, laser-cut collectibles made & distributed at Hack Night every week. Each one is made by a different person & engraved with the date of its respective Hack Night.
Read blog post
Passports
Matthew Stanciu
⇥Handmade, faux-leather–bound booklets with embedded NFC chips. Official IDs for the Republic of Hackerland.
Read blog post
keymashed
Kartavya Vashishtha
⇥A livestream whose packets are controlled by a typing test. The slower you type, the more packets get dropped.
View on GitHub
The Sign
Jack Hogan
⇥A meter-tall Conway glider that lights up according to a color representation of the current time.
Read blog post
ETea
Jadden Picardal, Saahil Aneja, Alicia Zhou, Mason Graves
⇥A video game following the journey of an alien bobarista far from home.
View on Steam
Door Opener
Hazel Roeder
⇥A device that reads NFC data from a scanned passport & opens the door to Hack Night.
Read blog post
