shelflife by visitor

1999. The Columbine shootings and the Trenchcoat Mafia who brought the war to the cafeteria against a foreground of possibilities in a future-unknown of mind-dicing via the personal computer, FPS videogames and KMFDM records were still piping hot in the collective conscious. Aaron Rose was re-re-re-opening the Alleged Gallery in its then-latest incarnation. A group show was slated. He’d faxed out the mission briefing and the mission was Coup d’État.

As scene troubnologist, I was saddled with making a low-rent, low-tech, anxiety-inducing invitation. Aaron gave me a single photograph, a show title and basically told me to go to town. Computer viruses were in the news daily. PC users were hating life. BIOS chips were being re-flashed in a string of particularly virulent infections and people were losing everything. The invite would capitalize on that and the prevalent tech-gimmick-lust via the lure of art as interactivity.

I made a set of four fonts that weren’t. They were more like autistic etch-a-sketches that only did one thing. If a user followed the instructions, each font would draw a different picture. Type out some crap. Type it out again with caps lock on. Select everything and change the font. That was the gist.

First, they’d draw a picture of Bill Gates–”gates=ham”. Then they’d draw a picture of Gates with the Piggly Wiggly face–”ham=gates” (Bill was in the news constantly–so much so, that in ensuing years, he’d be forced to step out of the Microsoft limelight to rest a weary army of publicists and go poorly do good for the poor). When an invite recipient selected the keystrokes comprising the two portraits, they were suddenly met with a pre-Columbine to-do list and an equation declaring that guns + jocks = a trenchcoat.

All good and well. However this… convenient and completely unplanned stroke of luck fell into our laps. A vicious virus started infecting computers within days of the invite being mailed out. Anxiety came gratis in pre-Y2K America so long as your timing was right.

Here’s what we gave the people. I’m working on something completely apropos of this project right now. It involves me programing hundreds of IC chips and laser etching tons of tiny PC boards to make custom, compact, troublemaking circuits that I’m pretty certain nobody’s exploited yet…