World of Warcraft’s Corrupted Blood plague inspired this cursed artwork

This chest is reminiscent of something from an ancient fantasy horror game, such as Diablo. It has sharp bony protrusions and ligaments that are twisted. All this in a ghostly pale color. It’s repulsively organic, but also has an occult, ceremonial air. This cursed item is actually an art piece called Relic of Corrupted BloodHarris Rosenblum, a Boston-based artist. You may have guessed from its title that it’s actually a Blizzard-related game. World of Warcraft.

This bug is probably the most notorious of all. WoW’s long history, which birthed one of the most famous unscripted incidents in any online game. Corrupted Blood was a debuff applied to players during the climactic boss fight of the Zul’Gurub raid, and it was transmissible between characters in close proximity to each other. A bug allowed the debuffs to spread beyond the bounds of Zul’Gurub raid. WoW’s world of Azeroth, becoming an actual in-game pandemic. The powerful debuff could instantly kill lower-level characters, but non-player characters carried it without showing any symptoms. While some players attempted to organize a healing response, griefers devised new ways to spread it.

Two tiny windows are located on each side of the Relic of Corrupted BloodRosenblum decided to place an SD card in each sculpture. The first patch is the one that started the Corrupted blood pandemic and the second patch fixes it. The cards give the piece a kind of Schrödinger’s Cat feel — as if this disgusting box is holding two potential realities in place at the same time.

Harris Rosenblum

“Yeah, totally,” laughs Rosenblum, talking to me from his home in Boston via video call. “There’s a weird duality that you can get from having both of those possible game states as one thing. You might, for example, need to use the relics of Corrupted blood at some stage, or you may even require them at another point. [the power of the fix]. They kind of exist in the same space.”

Rosenblum wears small, round glasses with a sleek, modern look. His hair is wiry and dark. He’s originally from Denver, Colorado, has a Master of Fine Arts degree from Kent State University in Ohio, and works as a digital fabrication tech at Harvard, helping people use “weird machines” like 3D printers and laser cutters. As an artist and researcher, he’s interested in new digital fabrication techniques, industrial and postindustrial crafts, and the culture of online spaces. His cursed WoWHis exhibition was centered around his chest. Relics from the Corrupted BloodHe has a brand new show. Inorganic Demons, opening at Sara’s in New York on April 14.

Rosenblum doesn’t play video games and describes himself as “not The following are some examples of how to use online,” but he has a fascination with the new social structures emerging in online spaces, and the new realities people are able to create for themselves there. He first learned about the Corrupted Blood episode during the COVID-19 epidemic, which brought its parallels with real-world incidents back to the forefront of the public’s consciousness. He was interested in the incident’s unplanned, organic nature, how it allowed players to take control of the game narrative, and how it was later “re-canonized” in a pre-patch event for the The Lich KingThe plague was a more controlled version of the expansion.

Rosenblum thought the griefers’ response was particularly interesting. “I don’t mean any offense by this, but people who are a little bit more at the margins of society, who feel a little bit more alienated, find these homes and spaces,” he says. “Like, the griefer has the ability to really reform reality and reform these worlds in a way that the person who just kind of tacitly understands what’s going on around them and agrees with it doesn’t.”

Harris Rosenblum

In other pieces, Rosenblum has found himself returning to other figures from online and gaming culture, like Hatsune Miku and the Orks from Games Workshop’s tabletop Warhammer games. He was interested in Hatsune Miku because she’s basically a vehicle for fan-created art, and the community has agency over her; and in the Orks he saw a symbol of “this amorphous and, like, ever-powerful version of the working class that no force can really come up against. That seemed like something that was really beautiful to me.” Another piece, Vitalik’s SwordThe SD card is sealed inside a large sword modeled after a two handed sword which may have been used by a WoW Vitalik Buterin is the creator of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency. Buterin claims to have named Ethereum after one of his favourite characters. WoWThe character in the patch was changed. Another, Infinite SqualorThis is a terrifying wall of images taken from the Neckbeard Nests Reddit.

The internet as a democratized space — or at least, a space of resistance — is key to Rosenblum’s work. “We’re in this moment of capitalist realism where reality continues on this neoliberal path forward that continues to make less and less sense for more people. Online spaces allow people to escape the realities of the world, while still allowing them to create their own imaginative alternate universes. [in place of]The consensus reality, which exists in politics is something they create. Reality feels like it’s fracturing.”

Harris Rosenblum

Funnily enough, there is a connection here to another, far older inspiration for Rosenblum’s work. “The fact that fans are generating this lore and generating these fanfictions, and then that winds up sometimes being reintegrated into canon. […] There’s nothing else like this except for, honestly, medieval Catholicism.” He mentions the cult of saints whereby the “consensus reality of the church didn’t match with the lived reality of people” in certain areas. “They would essentially create their own fanfiction of Christ, and it would get reintegrated. That’s what I see these online spaces as being able to do for our current time.”

Rosenblum’s wife, a curatorial assistant at a museum, is a student of the cult of saints and turned him on to the medieval phenomenon of reliquaries — the ornate, ceremonial, “semi-monumental” objects that would be created to hold tiny fragments of bone or cloth said to relate to saints. Relic of Corrupted Blood The SD cards that contain the patch data are arranged in a reliquary-like structure. “It’s just silicone, it’s just sand that gets refined in a really intense way,” he says of the SD cards. “But there’s such an intense meaning that you can hold within that, and then the object almost just acts in service of showing what the content of this stream of little transistors is.”

To create the chest’s uniquely horrible 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 being pioneered by the cosplay community. He studied videos on how people make Halloween props, and adapted techniques from Warhammer Figure Painting, such as dry-brushing. For the primer, he made a historical material called clay bole, traditionally used in gilding, “but I made it all out of stuff I can essentially get at the health food store.”

Rosenblum seems evasive when asked about his location. Relic of Corrupted Blood’s extremely disturbing look came from. “I kind of firmly believe the aesthetics emerge from the material conditions of the thing […]The game’s event, the cosplay and the materiality of the postindustrial era. And then there’s only a determinate amount of ways that that can look,” he says. “I could have spray-painted it with silver spray paint and made it look, like, super sexy or whatever,” he says of the piece’s gross, naked finish. “But I think it’s nicer to lean into it, like the surface has a meaning and materiality to it. So that’s why it looks kind of creepy and occult.”

The story of Astor WoWThe politics of griefing. Cosplay. DIY gilding. It’s a heady mix of influences that, like all good art, creates something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s possible to see the same thing in an internet JPG. Relics from the Corrupted Blood It has a powerful unsettling power. It’s cursed, in a good way.