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

polygon.com:

It looks like something out of an eldritch fantasy horror, perhaps a Diablo game: a modestly sized chest covered in sharp, bony extrusions, gnarled ligaments, and twisted veins, all rendered in a pale, ghostly, fleshlike color. It’s repulsively organic, but also has an occult, ceremonial air. In fact, this cursed object is an artwork called Relic of the Corrupted Blood, by a Boston artist named Harris Rosenblum. And as you may be able to tell from the title, it is actually connected to another Blizzard game: World of Warcraft.

The 2005 Corrupted Blood plague is perhaps the most notorious bug in 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. Due to the bug, the debuff escaped the confines of the raid and quickly spread across WoW’s world of Azeroth, becoming an actual 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 set up an organized healing response, while griefers contrived ways to spread the disease further.

There are two tiny windows on the sides of the Relic of the Corrupted Blood sculpture, and in each of them Rosenblum placed an SD card. One carries the patch that introduced the Corrupted Blood pandemic, and the other the patch that fixed 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.

“Yeah, totally,” laughs Rosenblum, talking to me from his home in Boston