Milano, 23.04.01

The beauty of computer viruses at the "D-I-N-A".

It is entitled "virii virus viren viry", or on the beauty of the source code, and is the first exhibition on viruses ever realised inside or outside the Web. It was featured at the international d - i - n - a (digital is not analogical) festival, a new show about all worrying developments in web experimentation: hacktivism, net.art, privacy and control, plagiarism and more besides, now in its second edition. "virii virus viren viry" was held on 24, 25 and 26 May, at the Salara in Bologna. It was devised and produced by a group of programmer-artists and artist-programmers who go by the name of "epidemiC". The idea they put forward, one that has the support of the linguistic/IT expertise of certain key players on the Italian web, is that the writing of the source code, i.e. the text which programmes a virus to be set loose and do its work can be seen as an aesthetic product. Their programme responds to the disquieting and unstoppable desire to subvert the false notions which the information system has until now produced regarding the computer virus as a particular product. In short the idea that it is an art form, and that, because it is native to that complex space-cum-phenomenon that is the Web (a mass condominium) known as the Internet, it has all the credentials of a totally original avant-garde movement, one that is revolutionary and brings innovation both in terms of the generation of new linguistic, psychological, biological and communicational models and on a purely aesthetic level. They maintain that Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci would know immediately which side to take. And that the evolution of virus language, with the formalisation of the source code, will enter the public domain, both intrinsically, in its status as an aesthetic, communicative situationist act, and because of the knock-on effect this will have on all media production in and outside the Web.