World of Warcraft’s most notorious bug inspired this cursed piece of modern art

It looks like something out of an eldritch fantasy horror, maybe a Diablo game: a modest chest covered in sharp, bony extrusions, gnarled ligaments and twisted veins, all rendered in a pale, ghostly flesh-like color. It is repulsively organic, but also has an occult, ceremonial air to it. In fact, this cursed object is called a work of art Remnant of the tainted blood, by a Boston artist named Harris Rosenblum. And as you might be able to tell from the title, it’s actually connected to another Blizzard game: World of Warcraft.

The 2005 Corrupted Blood plague is perhaps the most infamous bug in Wow‘s long history, which led to one of the most famous unscripted incidents in an online game. Corrupted Blood was a debuff applied to players during the final boss fight of the Zul’Gurub raid, and it was transferable between characters that were close to each other. The bug caused the debuff to escape the borders of the raid and spread quickly Wowthe world of Azeroth, becoming a real in-game pandemic. Non-player characters could carry it asymptomatically, while lower-level player characters were instantly killed by the powerful debuff. Some players tried to mount an organized healing response, while griefers figured out ways to spread the disease further.

There are two small windows on the sides of the Remnant of the tainted blood sculpture, and Rosenblum put an SD card in each of them. One is wearing the patch that introduced the Corrupted Blood pandemic, and the other is wearing the patch that fixed it. The cards give the play a sort of Schrödinger’s Cat feel – as if this disgusting box is holding two potential realities in place at the same time.

“Yeah, totally,” Rosenblum laughs as he talks to me via video call from his home in Boston. “There’s this weird duality that you can get when you have both possible game states as one thing. Like, at some point you might need the power of the Corrupted Blood relic, or at some point [the power of the fix]. They more or less exist in the same space.”

Rosenblum has wiry, dark hair and wears small round glasses that look cool. Originally from Denver, Colorado, he holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Kent State University in Ohio and works as a digital fabrication technician at Harvard, helping people use “weird machines” like 3D printers and laser cutters. As an artist and researcher, he is interested in new digital manufacturing techniques, industrial and post-industrial crafts and the culture of online spaces. Are cursed Wow chest was the centerpiece of his exhibition Remnants of the tainted bloodwhich was applied by the Leaf study gallery in New York late 2022; he has a new show, Inorganic demonsopens at Sarah’s on April 14 in New York.

Rosenblum doesn’t play video games and describes herself as “not That online’, but he is fascinated by the new social structures emerging in online spaces and the new realities people can create for themselves there. He says he first learned about the Corrupted Blood incident during the COVID-19 pandemic when its obvious parallels to real-world events brought it back to the public consciousness. He was interested in the unplanned, organic nature of the incident, how it allowed players to take control of the game’s story, and how it was later “re-canonized” in a pre-patch event for the game. Wrath of the Lich King expansion that imitated plague in more controlled conditions.

Rosenblum found the griefers’ reaction particularly interesting. “I don’t mean this insultingly, but people who are a bit more on the fringe of society, who feel a bit more alienated, find these houses and spaces,” he says. “For example, the mourner has the ability to really reshape reality and reshape these worlds in a way that the person who tacitly understands and disagrees with what’s going on around them.”

Image: Harris Rosenblum

In other pieces, Rosenblum found himself returning to other figures from online and gaming culture, such as Hatsune Miku and the Orcs from Games Workshop’s tabletop Warhammer games. He was interested in Hatsune Miku because she is basically a vehicle for fan-made art, and the community has a say in her; and in the Orcs he saw a symbol of “this amorphous and, as, ever-powerful version of the working class that no force can really match.

That seemed like a very nice thing to me.” one more piece, Vitalik’s swordhas a unique NFT on an SD card sealed inside a giant sword modeled after a two-handed sword that may have belonged to a Wow character created by Vitalik Buterin, creator of the Ethereum cryptocurrency. (Buterin says he made Ethereum his favorite Wow character was nerfed in a patch.) One more, Infinite miseryis an overwhelming, gruesome wall of images that come out of the Neckbeard nests subreddit.

The internet as a democratized space – or at least a space of resistance – is key to Rosenblum’s work. “We are in this moment of capitalist realism where reality continues on this neoliberal path forward that continues to make less and less sense to more and more people. And so online spaces are these places where people have the ability to, not necessarily escape the conditions of it, but they have the ability to have these imaginative other worlds where [in place of] the consensus reality that exists politically, they invent their own reality. Reality feels like it’s breaking.

”

Image: Harris Rosenblum

Funnily enough, there is a connection here with another much older source of inspiration for Rosenblum’s work. “The fact that fans generate this lore and generate this fanfiction, and that is sometimes reintegrated into the canon. […] There’s nothing else like this except, frankly, medieval Catholicism. He mentions the cult of saints where the “consensus reality of the church did not match the lived reality of people” in certain areas. “They would essentially create their own fanfiction of Christ, and it would be reintegrated. That’s what I see these online spaces can do for our times.”

Rosenblum’s wife, an assistant curator at a museum, is a student of the cult of saints and led him to the medieval phenomenon of reliquaries – the ornate, ceremonial, “semi-monumental” objects that would be made to hold small pieces of bone or cloth said to relate to saints. Remnant of the tainted blood is styled as a kind of reliquary, with the SD cards containing the patch data playing the role of the relic fragments. “It’s just silicone, it’s just sand being refined in a really intense way,” he says of the SD cards.

“But there’s such an intense meaning in it that you can hold it in, and then the object almost just serves to show what the contents of this stream of tiny transistors are.”

To create the coffin’s unique hideous look, Rosenblum modeled it in 3D and then printed it out on a resin printer, before getting the organic finish by coating it in liquid latex using new crafting techniques developed by the cosplay community. He watched videos of people making Halloween props and adopted techniques, such as dry brushing, from Warhammer figure painting. For the primer, he made a historical material called clay bolus, traditionally used in gilding, “but I made it all out of stuff I can essentially get at the health food store.”

Rosenblum is a bit evasive about where Remnant of the tainted blood‘s extremely disturbing look came from. “I firmly believe that aesthetics arise from the material conditions of the thing […]: the thing that happened in the game, this cosplay thing and post-industrial materiality. And then there’s only a certain number of ways that can look like,” he says. “I could have spraypainted it with silver spray paint and made it look super sexy or whatever,” he says of the piece’s chunky, nude finish. “But I think it’s more fun to lean into it, as if the surface has meaning and materiality. So that’s why it looks kind of creepy and occult.”

A legendary one Wow bug, medieval Catholicism, 3D printing, the politics of grief, cosplay techniques and DIY gilding. It is a heady mix of influences that, like all good art, creates something greater than the sum of its parts. Even just observed in a JPG on the internet, Remnant of the tainted blood has an unnerving power. It’s cursed, in a good way.