Susan Sontag wrote at the time:
Information itself, now inextricably linked to the powers of computers, is threatened by something compared to a virus . . . Such metaphors drawn from virology, partly stimulated by the omnipresence of talk of AIDS, are turning up everywhere . . . and they reinforce the sense of the omnipresence of AIDS. It is perhaps not surprising that the newest transforming element in the modern world, computers, should be borrowing metaphors drawn from our newest transforming illness.67

Hackers themselves, few of whom likely read Sontag, were aware of this analogy. The first piece of ransomware, a digital infection that the hacker-author offers to cure for a fee, was distributed on infected floppy disks to AIDS researchers in 1989. Biologist Joseph Popp bundled the virus with a questionnaire that he wrote to determine one’s susceptibility to AIDS; he both mailed and hand-delivered twenty thousand infected disks to workers in ninety countries.68 The ransomware prevented infected computers
from booting, and in exchange for a cure demanded a $189 ransom payment to a post box in Panama. One of the other more common types of computer virus at that time attacked the user’s COMMAND.COM file, a basic system command which was frequently used. The most easily available remedy was a program in the public domain, which its developer called Condom after the best-known protection against AIDS.69

Like many in the art world in those days, Nechvatal was affected by the AIDS virus, though he did not contract it himself. One of his neighbors in his apartment building in the East Village had died of it. He recalled: “I pretty much assumed I had the virus. Besides having enjoying [sic] an unprotected sexual relationship with Bebe Smith, who died a most horrible death of AIDS in 1988 due to needle sharing, since the mid-1970s I had been enjoying a libertine and prolific and unprotected sex life in complete naiveté.” He waited until 1993 to submit to testing.70 One of his residencies in Arbois was sponsored by the Atelier Louis Pasteur, located in the town where the famous microbiologist had grown up; researchers at the Institut Pasteur in Paris were the first to isolate the retrovirus now known as HIV.

Of course, many artists took up the theme of AIDS, both before and after Nechvatal. A co-curator of the largest traveling museum show on the subject argued that the pandemic was important enough to affect the general course of art in the United States by serving as a nail in the coffin of detached postmodernism: “The show fundamentally argues that when AIDS was first in evidence in the American art world, there was a kind of orthodoxy governing contemporary art; it was considered anti-authorial and anti-expressive—Postmodernism ruled the roost. Ideas like ‘death of the author’ were sustainable until artists started to actually die.”71 Artistic responses to AIDS at that time already ran a very wide gamut. Conceptual art influenced many, such as Félix González-Torres, who displayed a pair of battery-operated clocks which ran down and stopped, a metaphor for perishing gay couples. Ross Bleckner made subtle, nearly abstract paintings of blood cells and skin lesions. Others were more directly expressive, such as Keith Haring’s mural-sized works depicting gay sex alongside inscribed warnings. Some were more literally autobiographical, such as the paintings of David Wojnarowicz. The pandemic had some of its biggest impacts on the worlds of crafts and graphic design. The AIDS Memorial Quilt began 1987 as a community collaborative project to memorialize the dead by creating a quilt panel in honor of each deceased person. The graphic design collective Gran Fury in the 1980s worked closely with ACT UP to create vivid and sometimes controversial informative posters, signs, and handbills.

Against this backdrop, Nechvatal’s viral-attack paintings are among the more subtle and perhaps even beautiful responses to the AIDS pandemic. Their modulated surfaces, carefully selected colors, and ambitiously large format attract the eye. This leaves them possibly open to a charge of aestheticizing catastrophe, making the crisis seem bearable or even interesting. However, this is part of the artist’s intent. He told an interviewer: “The negative connotations of the HIV virus as a vector of disease is reflected in the principle of degradation of the image. But here, the virus is also the basis of a creative process, producing newness in reference to the major influence of the virus on evolution in biological systems.”72 Moreover, he had subjected his own creations to the infection: “The host was my own body of work, with the virus eating at the energy of the color.”73

In other works from around the same time, Nechvatal also subjected some of his viral-attack paintings to image manipulation, using techniques that would today be seen as banal: boosting color saturation, cropping, or duplicating a zone or an entire work along a horizontal axis to make it symmetrical. He also added degenerated, illegible blocks of text to the substrate for the virus to consume.74 The scale of the pictorial components often makes it unclear whether we are viewing a microcosm or a macrocosm. The title of the series refers, of course, to viral transmission, which would occur in the human body at a microscopic scale. The works seem to represent accurately a progressive infestation, frozen in time and seen under colored lights. The infestation has taken place quietly, slowly, inexorably. It is an image of poetic degeneration, wasted elegance, lyrical decay. Rottenness sings a hushed song. If the beauty of these works resembles that of ruins, Nechvatal himself was aware of the correspondence; he titled a 1991 work The Ruin. Nechvatal’s work provokes similar nostalgia, perhaps for the clearer imagery of his previous drawings now decayed by digital manipulation and viral contamination. The painting may remind today’s viewers of the past AIDS pandemic and its accompanying sense of crisis, now far less lethal (at least in wealthy countries) because of progress in treatment modalities. In this post-apocalyptic world of degraded and ruined information, the computer virus acts as a putrefying bacterium, munching away slowly and silently in the eerie technoscape. Faded elegance was not a common aesthetic strategy at that time, a fact which may help to account for Nechvatal’s reduced reputation today.

The beauty of these works, with their viral genesis, points to a different meaning of the word viral which took shape only after the internet became ubiquitous near the end of the twentieth century. “Going viral” now has many more connotations as memes, fads, speech gaffes, dance steps, subcultures, fake news, and political resistance movements all rely on nearly immediate “infection” of readers/users, who may “contract” a diverse array of feelings and effects ranging from rage to bemusement to hope, leading, in turn, to a range of effects on the culture.75 The Covid-19 pandemic nudged the meaning of viral back toward its disease-related connotations, but the fading severity of the disease amid the continuing onslaught of memes is restoring the reactions of surprise or amusement that accompanies most phenomena that have “gone viral.” Note also that Nechvatal titled the series viral attaque rather than Viral Attack, suggesting that the event should provoke interest and attention rather than panic. We are encouraged to view these viral attacks with detachment rather than amusement, rage, or fear." (Chapter 1: Joseph Nechvatal and the Ecstasy of Communication, Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered, Patrick Frank, Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2024, pp. 21–23)