Every year different exhibitions all over the world celebrate the universe of new technologies developed by researchers and programmers on a constant basis. Yet nobody celebrates computer viruses, after all there isn't much to celebrate about them, considering that the potential damages they can do.
A new exhibition opening in July at The Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, focuses instead on the the destructive beauty of computer viruses. "Malware: Symptoms of Viral Infection" (from 5th July to 10th November 2019) looks at the history and evolution of the computer virus.
Curated by Bas van de Poel (who conducted a research about viruses in collaboration with the Research department of the Het Nieuwe Instituut) and Marina Otero Verzier, the exhibition starts with relatively innocent DOS viruses - Brain, CoffeeShop and Crash - invented over 30 years ago.
Quite often the early viruses were produced for fun, as a hobby and a joke or for personal reasons by nerds or radical imaginaries. For example, Brain, the first computer virus for MS-DOS, spread around the world through floppy disks, was designed in 1986 by two Pakistani brothers, Basit Farooq Alvi and Amjad Farooq Alvi, to protect their medical software from piracy.
As the years passed and the Internet developed, viruses spread faster: it is calculated that more than a million viruses have been developed while hundreds of millions devices have been infected.
First there were email worms such as Anna Kournikova (designed in 2001 by 20-year-old Dutch student Jan de Wit, and tricking email users into opening an infected email that seemed to contain a picture of the tennis player Anna Kournikova) and later on ansomware (criminal hostage software that prevents users from accessing their system or personal files and demands ransom payment in order to regain access) such as including PolloCrypt, Kenzero and Cryptolocker.
While Kenzero (2010) publishds the user's browsing history, showing the pornographic sites visited and demanded a payment for removing this list from the internet, the ransomware PolloCrypt (2015) referred to a fictional location in the TV show "Breaking Bad", the Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant chain.
From products of sub- and countercultures aiming at disrupting the existing economic and political structures of power, viruses became scarier in the last 15 years and were used as spyware and as a geopolitical weapon by governments.
The Stuxnet, a highly advanced Windows worm that destroyed roughly one-fifth of Iran's nuclear installations, was developed by the US and Israeli governments to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme; the 2017 NotPetya cyberattacks, rumoured to be the result of Russian interference, broke the computers of hospitals, banks and the government in Ukraine, affecting also airports, power companies and ATMs and card payment systems; the Netherlands too has its own Defence Cyber Command that can attack, manipulate or switch off the digital systems of its enemies.
The exhibition includes simulation software, archive material and artistic interpretations (by Tomorrow Bureau and Bas van de Poel) to show this transition from prank to major international cybercrime.
The event points at the cultural impact of malware and raises questions concerning security, cyberwarfare and geopolitics, as viruses have indeed turned into digital weapons, intangible threats that can damage and steal personal information of private individuals, but also destroy the safety of entire countries.
That said, when a computer virus is well-made, it displays sophistication, complexity and beauty, and that's another point of the exhibition. The ultimate aim of this evetn, though, is not contemplating the elegance of malware, but prompting visitors (and in particular the design and tech communities) to think about how we can learn to design security and protect our privacy from malicious hackers and viral infections (consider how the Internet of Things can be used to spread viruses and cyber-attacks...). So don't miss "Malware" if you like the idea of viruses as art, but also as inspiration to create more advanced tools to fight against digital threats.
Supported by Kaspersky, the exhibition opens on 4th July 2019 at 19:00 with a lecture by Jussi Parikka, author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses.
Stuxnet, artistic interpretation by Tomorrow Bureau and Bas van de Poel from Het Nieuwe Instituut on Vimeo.
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