Launch Artwork

The Ghost of Vannevar Bush Hacked My Server

Description

Vannevar Bush was an engineer and science administrator best known for his role in the development of the atomic bomb and the memex, an adjustable microfilmviewer which laid the foundation for the structure of the Internet. He believed in technological innovation as the path to economic and geopolitical security, but at the height of the Cold War his feelings shifted when he saw that technology lead away from understanding and toward destruction. He died in 1974.

On October 28, 2009 an image appeared to flash on a web server. Comprised of 0s and 1s (binary code — the elemental language of computers), the image closely resembled that of Vannevar Bush. The code from that page was copied and pasted into a blank page, effectively “capturing” this ghost of Vannevar Bush. He appears at random, having hacked my server he now haunts it for all of eternity...

Rhizome Terms: Digital, Generative art, History, Information visualization, Internet, Net art

Artist Terms: Ghost, Hacked, Server, Vannevar Bush

Michael Demers has taught college level Digital Art and New Media courses since 2007. His own work incorporates culture and cultural identity in a synthesis of critical investigation and his own adolescent preoccupation with toys and other weird ephemera. He has exhibited internationally, most recently at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Artists Space (New York), and the Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), and is a member of the White Columns Artist Registry (New York), the Rhizome Curated ArtBase (New Museum, New York), BitStream New Media, and is a core commentator for TINT Arts Lab (London, UK). He received his BFA from Florida Atlantic University, an MFA from Ohio University, and a Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Diplom from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, Germany.

"I am interested in how the things we do, the ways in which we occupy our time, affects our place in the world and the ways in which we move through time and space. It is the ephemera that I find fascinating — the toys and stories, collections, habits, hopes and beliefs, and the vestiges of those experiences that linger in the ether, that define us both personally and culturally..."

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