CULTUREWATCH An artistic interpretation of our networked world BY ALEXANDER PROVAN

Although President Bush has yet to admit it, the events of 9/11 proved that missile-defense systems (a pet project of Ronald Reagan in the ’80s) and other Pentagon favorites are failure-prone and destined for the worldview of the last century. While obtaining weapons of mass destruction may be difficult (though not difficult enough), any sufficiently skilled hacker — whether terrorist, hobbyist, or self-anointed vigilante — can wreak havoc on our increasingly networked society with no more than a computer and an Internet connection.

By freezing computers in government and corporate offices, paralyzing networks, stopping business transactions, and forcing companies to hire people to fix this mess, the "I love you" virus caused more than $8 billion in estimated damage after it was unleashed in 2000. "I love you [rev.eng]," an art exhibition that opened at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University on Friday, September 10 (running through October 4), showcases the phenomenon of computer viruses and their effects on global security. Viewing viruses as potentially destructive or productive, the show examines the components of digital culture — hackers, security experts, ’net-based artists, and programmers — and their tenuous role in the information age.

James Der Derian is the director of the InfoTechWarPeace project at the Watson Institute, which is presenting the exhibition with the German organization digitalcraft. During the opening symposium last week, Der Derian described each network as an "organic, living creature." The "I love you" virus consisted of a terse declaration of affection and a destructive attachment dispersed across the globe by unwitting computer users. Franziska Nori, digitalcraft’s curator and director, credits "I love you" with making "each one of us aware of the presence of these self-reproducing digital beings."

While anxiety surrounding viruses has grown to a fever pitch in recent years, with every major company hiring information security experts to erect their own Star Wars-inspired defense systems, films from Hackers to The Matrix continue to glamorize hackers as rebels resisting authority in Orwellian settings. The significance of the parenthetical play on words in the exhibition’s title — [rev.eng] can be read as "revenge" or "reverse engineering" — is explored in five videos about hacker culture that occupy one end of the Watson Institute’s ground floor, including New York City Hackers, Hippies from Hell, and Freedom Downtime.

Visitors to the show are immediately confronted with The Lovers, by Sneha Solanki. Two networked computers sit upon pedestals, displaying a classic romantic poem. One computer is infected with a virus, and over the duration of the exhibit, contaminates itself and its partner; the text file becomes corrupted and the poetry illegible. Other pieces include a history of viruses, a real-time simulation of a global computer virus outbreak, and examples of poetry written in programming languages.

A video montage called I love you (. . . but do you know what love really means?, by Caleb Waldorf, is the centerpiece of the exhibition’s main room. At once mesmerizing and pedagogical, it explicates some themes of the exhibition by juxtaposing visions of hacker culture from popular and independent films with waves of code, intimating the odd relationship between art, popular culture, and security. Ultimately, the complete security sought by governments, corporations and private citizens proves elusive in a world in which, as Der Derian said, quoting Jorge Luis Borges, during the show’s opening, "Everything touches everything."