snowdrive (2023)
Python program, flash drive, plastic beadsThe semantic links between the AIDS crisis and the growing democratization of technology expose how the language of global crises influences the design of technology and user interaction with computers. The living virus and the computer virus are discussed with a similar word bank: viral, virus, contagion, bug, catch, disorder, infect. How was the logic of the living virus mapped onto the computer virus? How does it inform user interaction with computer viruses? What are similar sentiments regarding both the living virus and the computer virus? What does it mean to have caught a bug? What does it mean to go viral?
The response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was also shaped by the affective dimensions of threat, as public health authorities and policymakers often responded with either avoidance or panic and fear rather than evidence-based, harm reduction fronted interventions.
snowdrive is a Python program with viral effects that enacts illness metaphors from the overlapping semantic fields of the history of malware and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The program draws on aesthetic and semantic references to viral illnesses by enacting commands on all text files in a directory and disfiguring them. The script is distributed on flashdrives left on bike racks and parking meters and users are prompted to copy the affected text files onto the drive and reintroduce the flashdrive to the public.
Language surrounding technology and computing throughout the 1980s-2000s borrowed heavily from the epidemics to illustrate the functionality of networked computing, viral content, and user design. The semantic links between the AIDS crisis and the growing democratization of technology exposes how capital interests influence the language of the global crises.
Illness as Metaphor is a 1978 work of critical theory by Susan Sontag, in which she challenged the language that is often used to describe diseases and the people affected by them that ascribes moral blame to those who get sick. snowdrive is a Python program to expound upon Sontag’s critique of the illness metaphor by acknowledging how the shape of web interaction interfaces are a result of the deployment of metaphors for contamination, morality, and punishment in the semantics of computer viruses. snow drive infects, contaminates, corrupts, alters, distances, and replicates the text. snow drive uses Susan Sontag’s critique of the illness metaphor by acknowledging how the shaping of user interfaces is a result of the deployment of metaphors for contamination, morality, and punishment in the semantics of computer viruses. Illness as Metaphor is a 1978 work by Susan Sontag, in which she challenged the language that is often used to describe viruses and the people affected by them that ascribe moral blame to those who get sick. Sontag offers this critique of the ways in which we use metaphors to talk about illness and says "the most truthful way of regarding illness...is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. ...It is toward an elucidation of those metaphors, and liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry." Similarly, in her work “AIDS and Its Metaphors”, she extends her arguments about the metaphors attributed to cancer to the AIDS epidemic. She argues that the use of figurative language to describe AIDS exacerbates the pain of those who are affected by it and needlessly causes anxiety among the general public. At the outset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, there was a widespread perception that the virus was a punishment for immoral behavior, particularly homosexuality and drug use. This stigmatization of those who were affected by the virus caused harm and further perpetuated the epidemic by discouraging people from seeking testing and treatment. Sontag admits that ''one cannot think without metaphors,'' and the more productive question to ask regards whether the metaphors we employ are well or poorly selected. They would be poorly chosen if they misrepresented the virus, are dehumanizing and degrading, or contribute to a person’s pain.
snow drive is placed in public and the user can potentially take it home. Computer culture adopts "virus" as a metaphor in order to enforce binary distinctions between inside/outside and body/machine and can be understood by examining late 20th-century consumer culture around computers. When the “home computer” and “family computer” became ubiquitous in homes, its acceptance as an everyday technology resulted in new associations whereby “home privacy became synonymous with personal, bodily intimacy”. What happens when you bring the device into your home? What does it mean to welcome the device into your computer? By enacting the ways individuals interact with and navigate the threat of the program, this project encourages users to evaluate and question why metaphors of virality remain commonplace within our descriptions of digital technology.
To supplement the flash drive being placed in public, I wrote a section of prose that exhibits the semantic crossover between the living virus and the computer virus. I discuss the functions of the Python program: randomness, distance, punctuation, repetition, reflection.
Blurring the subject of the prose could convey the ability to map language of the living virus and the computer virus over each other.
Randomness
The functions of my body fail to adhere to a chronology. In the sequential failure of organs, lesions, and portals opening in places I forgot existed, I realize that this problem is not a sequence of malfunctions and that a new body of text emerges from the disorder.
Body of another
Between bodies of texts is our struggle to distance ourselves from a mysterious and virulent virus. It forces us to construct linguistic and conceptual categories between bodies that cloud rather than clarify phenomenal reality. I am trying to say something across my body. My secret body does not have to tell you the secret, because you have it too. My “I” and your “I”, my “we” and your “you”, recognize each others’ affliction. My text is medicated by a memory of yours. I have a secret from the world that is familiar to sick people all over. Does it show in my eyes or my words or all over my arms? The body of another looks more like me than me, because it has me.
Going Viral
Put it in you, new shame and joy. Think of my contamination like a gift.
Honors Thesis Advised by Professor Kristopher Cannon at Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
*Open repository and documentation forthcoming