Eva Mattes (0100101110101101.org) — Biennale.py — functional computer virus at Venice

2001

Artists: Eva Mattes (0100101110101101.org), Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org), Epidemic (virus code collaborators) · Year: 2001 · Medium: Functional computer virus released at Venice Biennale — Python-based virus intended as artwork · Substrate: Python 2.x script containing functional self-replicating virus code; released on distributable media and on the internet at the Biennale's opening · Place: Venice, Italy (Biennale) · Institution: Slovenian Pavilion at 49th Venice Biennale Eva and Franco Mattes — working as 0100101110101101.ORG — wrote a small worm called Biennale.py in collaboration with the hacker group [epidemiC] and released it at the 49th Venice Biennale in June 2001, during the Slovenian Pavilion's group exhibition. The worm was real: it was self-replicating Python code that spread through email and local-network vectors. It was also harmless: the payload was not malware, just a silent copy that propagated for a short period and then stopped. The Biennale's catalogue listed the worm as an official exhibited work. Italian state anti-cybercrime authorities briefly attempted to detain the artists. The piece staged, with unusually clear legal geometry, the question that malware-as-art had been hovering around since the mid-1990s: is a self-replicating program that causes no harm an artwork, a crime, or both? The Italian authorities' answer was initially "crime"; the Slovenian Pavilion's answer was "artwork"; the international critical press's answer was that the question itself was the point of the piece. The 2001 exhibition ran for the full Biennale period without further intervention. Biennale.py extended the Mattes' earlier Life Sharing project (2000, elsewhere in this archive) in a specific direction. Where Life Sharing had opened the couple's own computer as a passive artifact, Biennale.py actively propagated — the work's material base was moving between hosts, replicating, multiplying. The worm was, in its small way, a genuinely live artwork that was doing something at the moment the viewer was encountering it. The subsequent decade of the Mattes' practice extended the methodology across multiple media and institutional settings: Nike Ground (2003, a hoax news-conference announcing Nike was buying Karlsplatz in Vienna), Stolen Pieces (1995–97, a retroactive conceptual piece in which the Mattes revealed they had stolen small fragments of famous artworks from museums over the years), and the ongoing gallery practice at Galerie Sprüth Magers. The Mattes continue to work from Brooklyn. Lore The Mattes coordinated with [epidemiC] — an Italian hacker collective whose members were anonymous — over several months of back-and-forth email to design Biennale.py so that it would propagate in an observable way but would not actually damage any system. The compromise engineering is itself interesting: the worm had to be real enough that a security researcher examining it would recognize it as a worm, but limited enough that infected hosts would not lose data or compute time. [epidemiC] programmed the propagation engine; the Mattes wrote the cultural framing. The worm is now held, in archived form, in several museum collections including the Museum of the Moving Image (New York), which acquired the source code in 2015. Sources • Mattes, Eva & Franco — Biennale.py (source code, 2001; archived copies at Rhizome). • Quaranta, Domenico — Media, New Media, Post-Media (Postmedia Books, 2010). • 0100101110101101.ORG — eva-and-franco.com (artist archive).