Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine
ARTIST
YEAR
COUNTRY
MEDIA
Computer viruses, like biological viruses, spread according to the species conservation laws: they attack an “organism” to settle and install their own habitat. In other, more rare, cases to destroy it. According to its survival instinct a virus wants to exist without restrictions, and this is exactly the main and only function of Biennale.py: to survive.
This Self Dis-Infesting Machine is a computer with no input, a Bachelor Machine whose only function is its own perpetual infection and disinfection. Like an Ouroboros, the virus and the antivirus, will fight each other endlessly in a life cycle with no exit. Every cycle lasts 186 seconds, for a total of 19 cycles in an hour, 456 a day and 166,440 a year. Until the host is alive, the cycle won’t last.
Biography
Eva and Franco Mattes - internationally known as 0100101110101101.ORG - is a couple of restless European con-artists who use non conventional communication tactics to obtain the largest visibility with the minimum effort. Born in 1976 they live between Barcelona, New York and Bologna, and work all around the world.
They have been pioneers in the net.art movement remixing famous digital art pieces and performing Life Sharing: a real-time digital self portrait, during which they even submitted to satellite surveillance for an entire year.
In the last decade they have been obsessively devoted to what they define “media actionism”, creating unpredictable mass-scale performances staged outside art-spaces, involving an unaware audience, where truth and falsehood mix to the point of being indistinguishable.
Among other wonderfully twisted things, they've erected fake architectural heritage signs, run media campaigns for non-existent action movies, and even convinced the entire populace of Vienna that Nike had purchased the city's historic Karlsplatz and was about to rename it "Nikeplatz."
Website
"The Future of the Present or the Present of the Future", a roundtable discussion with distinguished quests from leading media arts institutions around the world took place on June 10, 2008 at NAMOC Read more
