N/e/t/ /a/r/t/ /o/r/ /v/i/r/u/s/?/

"In a sense, artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans (collaborating as JODI since 1994) are the Dadaists of Internet art: Like those early members of the avant-garde, their work employs strategies of rupture and subversion to create an estrangement effect, jarring viewers for a moment out of their everyday lives online." Margaret Sundell, ArtForum

An innocent visit to www.jodi.org brings immediate, alarming results: Mini browser windows, each completely black except for the standard white menu bar, manically proliferate on your desktop; they'll persist until you close your Internet browser completely.

Does www.jodi.org still stand up as a seminal piece of net art? Or is it simply a virus? Does the work reveal something mysterious about the hidden programming that lies beneath the smooth surface of corporate software? And what does Jodi's work tell us about our Net condition - the complex online world we increasingly inhabit?

—ideasMart—

H/a/l/f/ /h/a/l/f/

The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

—Wikiquote; William Borroughs—

I/ /l/o/v/e/ /y/o/u/

Quem pensa que um vírus que computador é igual à um vírus humano, está completamente... certo! Bom, em certa parte certo.
Um vírus humano, como o HIV, tem a função de contaminar todas as células do seu organismo, assim como o vírus Donatelo tinha como finalidade contaminar todos os arquivos .exe do seu computador.
Assim como o vírus HIV, o vírus de computador é transmitido de várias maneiras diferentes. Seja ela por disquete, e-mail, programas ou até mesmo por cartões postais. Um vírus vem sempre escondido, camuflado.
Em sua grande maioria das vezes, o vírus infecta o computador do usuário, através de e-mails com mensagens de parabéns, de feliz ano novo, ou até mesmo de mensagens amorosas, como o vírus I Love You.

—Vírus de Computador—

T/h/e/ /e/l/e/c/t/r/o/n/i/c/ /r/e/v/o/l/u/t/i/o/n/

I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. (...) we may forget that a written word is an image and that written words are images in sequence that is to say moving pictures. (...) My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls biologic mutation effecting a biologic change in its host which was then genetically conveyed. One reason that apes cannot talk is because the structure of their inner throats is simply not designed to formulate words. He postulates that alteration in inner throat structure were occasioned by a virus illness ....

— William S. Burroughs, 'The Electronic Revolution'—