About the Film

This hackathon documentary film follows Rewriting The Hack, a two-day, women-only hackathon held at The Core in Newcastle’s Science Central in November 2015. Curated by digital artist Shelly Knotts and curator Suzy O’Hara, and supported by Victoria Bradbury, the event was part of Inhabiting the Hack, a Communities and Culture Network project funded by RCUK Digital Economy. It remains one of the more unusual briefs in my archive, closer to documenting a live, unfolding process than any conventional shoot.

A Hack With a Different Shape

The venue mattered as much as the theme. As Suzy O’Hara explained, Science Central sits on the site of an old coal mine, making The Core a genuinely tangible representation of post-industrial Newcastle, the perfect setting for a hack exploring the city’s industrial and post-industrial history through women’s narratives specifically. Shelly Knotts described the aim simply: to get a group of brilliant women with very different skill sets, coders and artists alike, into one room together.

Several participants reflected on how different that made the atmosphere compared to a typical hackathon. One described how being away from the usual pressure to produce something immediately impressive let people relax into genuinely shared, distributed creativity instead. Another spoke about how rare it still was to spend a few days working almost entirely alongside other women in a technology space, and how much more willing people felt to ask questions and push ideas forward as a result.

Working with the Mining Institute Archives

Much of the practical work centred on archival material from the Mining Institute, used to trace how the history of Newcastle, and the largely unrecorded role of women within it, could be surfaced through data and code. One group built an LED timeline that changed colour year by year to visualise loss of life in the mining industry over time. Another worked with an Arduino sensor that shifted a recorded voice from male to female as a visitor moved closer, a small, pointed experiment in how we read authority in a voice. A third group, only half-jokingly, described their build as a smart tablecloth intended for boardrooms, a wry response to a conversation about what stress-relieving, traditionally domestic actions like knitting or sewing might look like in a formal business meeting.

What the Women Said

Several participants spoke candidly to camera about what the space itself meant to them, beyond whatever got built over the two days.

This hackathon is giving me space to talk about personal experiences of what it’s like to be a woman in a predominantly male dominated field, and to have this discussion in real time with other women who are in similar positions.

Others spoke about discovering the hidden history of early computing, in which programming had originally been women’s work before the field became male-dominated by the mid-twentieth century, and about the particular pleasure of reading archival accounts of confident, combative women workers from Newcastle’s industrial past.

Filming as It Happened

I filmed and edited this hackathon documentary film across the two days of the event itself, ingesting footage and cutting b-roll almost as soon as I had shot it, with a rough cut ready to show the group by the end of the weekend. That meant building the narrative in real time rather than after the fact, with no real sense in advance of which conversations or builds would end up carrying the film. It remains one of the more demanding edits I have done for exactly that reason, and one of the more rewarding, since the finished hackathon documentary film became something the group could see and respond to before they had even left the room.