[phage]

software / computer / network / installation

“Like such artist-made browsers as I/O/D’s Web Stalker and Maciej Wisniewski’s Netomat, Mary Flanagan’s _Phage_ offers an alternative visualization of electronic information–but instead of browsing the Internet, it browses your hard drive. A downloadable Director program that thinks it’s a psychoanalyst, _Phage_ dredges up random images, texts, and sounds from the nooks and crannies on your C drive. You’ll be surprised what’s lurking in the depths of your computer’s unconscious.”

–Jon Ippolito June 2000 - Juror Statement, netArt 2000
artist, Curator Media Arts, Guggenheim Museum, NYC

[phage] is a computer application which is viral– an artificial life form. [phage] filters through all available material on a specified workstation and places it in an alternate context-a visible and audible moving 3D spatialized world. I encourage this virus lifeform to spread via email (but only by the consent of the host).

The project explores the permeable and viral nature of digital data and our relationship, as users, to both the data and the machine. By mapping a userâs unique experiences– through images, downloads, web sites visited, emails–the computer program creates spatial memory maps that not only reflect the computer and technoculture in content, but the user’s artifacts from his or her interactions. In this way, the [phage] program reflects each user as an individual. The work, in fact, becomes about the user’s experience with the particular computer.

see [phage] in NZ

[phage] creates new living sculptures from our own data, thus mixing ideas of authorship between programmer, operating system, and users. It eradicates gender-based notions previously associated with the life creating process, and it questions the command and control paradigms which created the computer in the first place. [phage] creates a feminist map of the machine through its non-hierarchical organization and its divorce of creative control (and reproductive control) from the user. [phage] allows the user to experience his or her computer memory as a palimpsest of his or her own life experiences rather than know the computer as simply a tool for daily use.

The title of [phage] plays upon the coded word “virus”– referring to a bacteriophage, a constructive human virus that preys on harmful bacteria. Phage, from the Greek phagein, meaning “to eat.”

[phage] was created in Macromedia Director and is available for download below. It will do no harm to your system. It takes time to scan the system at first, so have patience if you have immense hard drives. Download [phage] for pc now!

-Click here for the compressed winzip format (1.9MB, must be uncompressed to run)
-Click here for the uncompressed .exe (about 3MB)

Read paper about [phage].

This project was a winner in the DIGITAL 2000 International Competition & Exhibition sponsored by
Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI)

…”The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.”

–vannevar bush, as we may think 1945