Myself.write MyCode sees ever-controversial performance artist Peet Pienaar team up with fellow members of the Daddy Buy Me A Pony initiative - Heidi Pietersen and Stacy Hardy - together with Dror Eyal a bitmap b/boy and Gareth Chisholm of Radarboy head office in a multi-media culture jam that explores advertising through the guise of a malicious computer virus WORM.
Hey daddy 'o, did you just open an attachment and release a malicious WORM onto your computer system? Now the sleazy thing is wiggling around your hard drive and replicating it's ooey-gooey self every chance it gets! Eeeuuuw! Relax, it's nothing you haven't seen before, just a slightly more malicious example of Nike’s Just do it! campaign, or Coca Cola’s Coke is life downshifted to the speed of the counterfeit.
Taking their cues from the most infamous of virus WORMS, the LOVE BUG that took over the world's computer networks in May last year, the artists deconstruct advertising’s ability to subsume everything in it’s path from a position of faux innocence. I love you. It says in a drippy, tender tone before it consumes you. I love you. Advertising is the hapless lover, so self satisfied and obsessed that it consumes any difference. I love you, therefore you must be like me.
Mangling art with technology and cyber-crime, the exhibition takes the form of an advertising campaign for the code of a virus WORM, specially developed by the artists of the show. But it’s not all tongue in cheek pay-off lines and seductive imagery: an interactive CD-ROM containing the code for the nasty little virus will also be on sale at the exhibition.
Multi-tasking technophile Gareth Chisholm will also be flick-knifing through mediums and messages with his interactive work.
WARNING. MALICIOUS CODE! USE AT YOUR OWN RISK! This is a code for a dangerous virus that could potentially wreak wide-scale havoc on computer networks. It is a criminal offence to convert the code into an active.vbs and release the virus. Reads the artist’s disclaimer on the CD-ROM’s super slick packaging. Tempting isn’t it?
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