COPY ME

The automatic replication and distribution of information is fascinating. The first time I came across the following string: "Copy me - I want to travel", I was once again reading the entry on Dark Avenger in Patricia Hoffman's VSUM virus encyclopedia (1996). The phrase etched itself into my head twice over —some of you may know that repetition does wonders for helping children retain information, often of little use—. The first time, because it was English text with words I could already recognize as a little kid, from typing the same commands into an MSDOS console over and over. The second, when I took the Larousse dictionary and translated, word by word, the text I hoped would reveal itself to me in Spanish.

That phrase comes from V2000, a 2000-byte variant of the Eddie virus, written by the Bulgarian programmer Dark Avenger in the late 80s or early 90s. Because of that text hidden in the code, the virus also became known as the "Travel Virus". The phrase works like a secret for those who know how to unlock it: "Copy me - I want to travel". It sums up the logic of a virus, which depends on being copied in order to survive. In a later interview, Dark Avenger reportedly said that what attracted him most was creating a program that would travel on its own to places its creator could never go, which lends the phrase an almost poetic ring, though nothing confirms that this was exactly what he meant when he wrote the message into V2000. Over time, the phrase became so iconic that it lent its title to a documentary about the hunt for Dark Avenger, whose real identity was never revealed.

To this day I'm still struck by everything packed into "Copy me - I want to travel". What intrigues me most is that the code of that virus, in order to replicate and survive, must remain in absolute secrecy, which makes the very existence of that message unnecessary. It stirs something in me that I can't quite put into words. The fact that the author hid that message works on several levels. It's not only clever, it's funny too. And it has (on me) a double effect, because I imagine it was funny to him while he was coding it, and surely twice as funny when they discovered the virus he had written, along with the message he had hidden.

Copy me - I want to travel is my own take on that moment, thirty years later. I study the replication of my own code in every place I can replicate it: from processes and pages running in concert on [~tilde] servers to [bots] downloading information with no coherence whatsoever, only chaos, to remix whatever they find and upload it as YouTube videos. I even explore, without a shred of shame, how to pay tribute to that Bulgarian whose name we will never know, who lived in the city of Sofia. I'm making small self-replicating pieces of digital art that, depending on the project, also infect files on different platforms, to leave users dumbfounded when they reveal themselves on their monitors: my kinetic paintings.

I almost forgot! Who am I, you ask? kjjj. How do you do? I am Mateo Brennan, a spacetime engineer specializing in the 2020s. Delighted to have you here.

As I was telling you, I spent far too long sweeping byte secrets under the rug. Right now my programs, processes and binary contraptions are sailing across the Internet, seeking to infect your non-binary devices with bytes, attention and memetics. Truly, it is astonishingly impossible to tell the exact moment when the byte —or the meme, depending on the context— invades the mind and forges thought, programming humans. That is exactly why I love this era of humanity, in which I can still sway minds and hearts with beautiful things, just before the invention of the psionic protections that plunged the human, synthetic and blobi collectives into unbearable torpor.