Contagious Art (A Virus in the Biennale)

0100101110101101.ORG, the anonymous Italian net art pranksters of artists and programmers exhibit a new computer virus

Normally in our Pin Code section, Mute’s favoured ‘celebrities’ are asked, in a ridiculously intimidating sort of way, to present their conceptual KEY to THE UNIVERSE. Most choose to employ words. When we invited 0100101110101101.ORG, the anonymous Italian net art pranksters, to contribute a Pin Code, they turned the page into another platform for spreading their art virus ‘biennale.py’. This super bug, that can seemingly attach itself to any host, can’t really be explained in words nor would we want to give the game away by explaining what it ‘does’. Instead, place this techno-conceptual gun to your head and say, “My computer is dead, long live my new computer”.

A virus is usually considered evil, chaos. But what happens when a contemporary art temple starts spreading the chaos? In response to our invitation to participate in the 49th Biennale, we conceived and compiled ‘biennale.py’ as a work of art and computer virus. The source code of the virus was publicised and spread from the Slovenian Pavilion on the opening day of the Biennale, June 6th 2001. The main anti-virus software companies have been informed about the technical specifications of ‘biennale.py’ and the disinstallation instructions are attached to the virus.(from the press release)

[http://www.0100101110101101.org]<biennale.py AT 0100101110101101.org>