ABOUT THE PROJECT V1R0L0GY In the world of computer & Internet we all have, at least once, come across a glitch and a computer virus. I am fascinated by both. I study glitches and I use them to make my art. Malwarez are, like it or not, part of computer history. Their evolution has been wild and huge. From simple programs to challange other programmers and prank early computer network users, they eventually became powerful weapons to cause damages, ransoms, wars. Considered a primitive generation of smart softwarez, before they became dangerous and silent, they were manifesting their presence through edgy graphic art works. Part of my series V1R0L0GY, this work is a celebration of computer failures, computer culture, internet history and the poetic of chaos.

ABOUT THE VIRUS Maldal.C is a variant of the very famous Maldal virus. Maldal.C was a mass mailer worm appeared for the first time on a December 19th 2001. It originated in South Africa, programmed in Visual Basic and attacked MS Windows.

The subject line of the email is "Happy New Year". The email arrives with an attachment, a christmas.exe file. The message body is: Hii , I can't describe my feelings But all I can say is Happy new year :-) bye

When the malicious program is executed, it displays a window with a cartoonish style picture of Santa Claus with a reindeer and a new year message. It will then copy itself to the Windows folder as Christmas.exe. The file will run when the computer is started as the file is registered with the local machine run key.

The worm will also change the name of the computer to ZaCker. A Geocities website containing the "Sharoon" text will be set as the favorite homepage, it overwrites some files with in the original variant. This page is infected with a JavaScript file that creates a file named "rol.vbs" on the root of the drive Windows is installed on.

It will also delete every files it will find in numerous directories and it will complete other damaging tasks.

The keyboard will be locked and the virus will procede deleting everything from the system folder. If the worm has been running for more than 30 minutes and was executed when the number= of seconds was 5, the work will delete all files on the system, display a message and shut down the system.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK The work was made interpreting the image data of a .JPG as hexdecimal values in a software called XVI32. Those altered data were altered by deleting some of the data of the original file and exported into image data again. This process is known as Databending Incorrect Editing. The altering was repeated for several sessions and all of the images used as the frames for this animation.