[add to auto-destructive art]

Franziska Nori (2002), ed., I Love You: Computer, Viren, Hacker, Kultur, exhibition catalogue, Museum FŸr Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, http://digitalcraft.org


The I Love You virus (2000) spread through the communities of the Internet, declaring love but bringing destruction. The analogy to love is a mean one (like HIV) but also the analogy of the virus is not without its problems of description. When the phrase virus was coined in 1983 by Fred Cohen, it was used generally to describe the self-reproducing activities of a program that could spread and effect other programs (Ferronato, in Nori, 2002: 22) - and thereby with ideological reach ('packet sniffers' might be a good example as programs that read data sent by users, recognise passwords and collect them). Viruses themselves can arguably be traced further back to 1945 and von Neumann's theory of self-reproducing automata (Burj‡n, in  Nori, 2002: 84). There is the process itself rather like virtual graffiti or aspects of artificial life, but also the metaphor of cultural infection to consider. They are not simply one and the same, but one evokes the other in that foreign systems can be invaded and altered from within. The potential use of this is quite another matter of ethical and political dimensions. 

The work of the techno-art collective Etoy is a good example in the ways their 'cultural viruses' have invaded the systems of commerce and finance (Ludovico, in Nori, 2002: 38). Others use viruses for productive purposes in the service of capital. Another prime example of a virus literally entering the art world is the 'biennale.py' virus that contaminated the Venice Biennale's web site (produced by 0100101110101101.org with epidemiC, for the Slovenian pavilion, 2000; the source code is available in spoken form from http://www.epidemiC.ws/love.mp3). In this way, the aesthetic considerations of programming wherein the elegance of the code and the results it produces might be extended to the destruction it induces. Here a further parallel is evoked to auto-destructive art.

The virus appears to be the paradigmatic form for the structural properties of the computer and the Internet. This might well be extended to arts practice of course, and this is what the exhibition I Love You: Computer, Viren, Hacker, Kultur attempted (held at the Museum FŸr Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 2002). According to Alessandro Ludovico, this is an incitement to 'compare viruses and their ways of collecting and generating information to the way we produce language.' (Nori, 2002: 42) The epidemic crew make this more explicit when they claim: 'Form and function coincide and reach the heights of poetry itself, in the case of viruses, with all the foundational potential of a language which was born for the net and developed on it.' (in Nori, 2002: 54) For them, the value of the art object lies not in the object but in the exchange itself; in file sharing, and the propagation of peer to peer networks. For Jaromil (part of epidemiC), the source code of a virus is potential lyrical poetry appropriate to the chaos and permeability of the environment it operates through. For him, 'viruses are spontaneous compositions which are like lyrical poems in causing imperfections in machines "made to work"' and inciting rebellion (in Nori, 2002: 64).   

That a virus might be regarded as a work of art has a history. Florian Cramer, citing Tilman BaumgŠrtel, describes the work of Artemus Barnoz, in 1988, secretly installing a systems extension that produced a new age peace message on every system startup (in Nori, 2002: 76; a fuller description is in Robert Slade's 'History of Computer Viruses'; Cramer also explains that Artemus Barnoz was a pseudonym for Richard Brandow and Boris Wanovitch who were intricately linked to the Neoist project and the virus can thereby be seen as demonstrating Neoist purpose). Cramer is anxious to reclaim the history of the virus as art in terms of language and demonstrates his point with a range of examples including the cut-up technique of William Burroughs. Indeed language itself is a virus according to Burroughs, who speaks of: 'word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison' (Cramer, in Nori, 2002: 78; there are complex connections to be made here, including to the Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley's Magick, and Ron Hubbard's 'Dianetics' in turn influencing John Cage and Burroughs himself).