Graeme Arnfield’s kaleidoscopic essay film revolves around the story of Dr. Joseph Popp, an evolutionary biologist and architect of one of the earliest known examples of ransomware. In 1989, Dr. Popp distributed 20,000 floppy disks containing what would come to be known as the digital AIDS virus – a malevolent trojan horse that scrambled the contents of the victims’ computers and offered to unlock them only in return for a ‘licensing fee.’ Working with a range of digitally manipulated found footage, Arnfield explores the legacy of Popp’s virus drawing surprising connections to the US invasion of Panama, the construction of a butterfly conservatory in New York and the aesthetics of computational art.
