Speaking with Viruses

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Tagny Duff is an interdisciplinary artist working across media art and microbiology. She is one of the very few artists having materially worked ‘hands-on’ with viruses and bacteriophages in laboratories throughout her career, producing works such as Living Viral Tattoos (since 2006) and Cryobook Archives (since 2010). She published ‘Going Viral: Live performance and documentation in the science laboratory’ in the 2009 Performance Research issue ‘Transplantations’.

This article is based on a paper delivered by the author at the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts conference in 2016 in Stockholm.

Notes

1 Performativity of viruses as entities of death can be seen promoted in public media campaigns from the early days of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) pandemic– that is, AIDS: Monolith (1987) and The Grim Reaper (1987).

2 During epidemics of influenza regional and/or nation state quarantine have promoted isolationism. For example, during the Spanish flu pandemic (H1N1 influenza A virus) from January 1918 to December 1920, there was a turn away from internationalism as countries around the world imposed quarantine laws, and, simultaneously, there was an increase in xenophobia (hence the term ‘Spanish flu’ when in fact the virus emerged in the USA). We see a similar emergence of xenophobia, national isolationism and exceptionalism with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic a century later. An example is the insistence of United States of America’s president Donald Trump that COVID-19 be referred to as a ‘Chinese Virus’, which is based on an unsubstantiated claim that China started the pandemic.

3 Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEMs) and Atomic Force Microscopes (AFMs) are visualizing technologies used to render images of viruses. They have limitations. For example, it is not the form of a sample that is captured as an image by an SEM microscopes objective lens. Rather, it is the backscattering of atoms bouncing off the form of a sample that is captured to render images of nanoscopic viruses. Often the integrity of a sample’s form is altered in the process.

4 ‘Junk DNA’ refers to regions of DNA that are non-coding. The human genome contains 98 per cent of so-called junk deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Some science research suggests that this ‘junk DNA’ could be ancient retroviruses implicated in evolutionary development. See Markovitz (2014).

5 Lentivirus, a derivative of HIV-1 and a retrovirus, is used in scientific research laboratory as vectors to deliver target genes in cell cultures since the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the 1980s.

6 This ability of retroviruses to transfer genes across species is noted in early scientific research on the ‘C’ virus by Benveniste and his laboratory collaborators in the late 1970s. Philosophers Deleuze and Guattari reference the C virus directly from the science research papers to develop their concept of ‘involution’ – a creative and transversal communication between heterogeneous populations and species – noting, ‘There is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a C virus.’ See: Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 238–9).

7 Ecosophy is a concept proposed by Félix Guattari where the development of social ecology, mental ecology and environmental ecology will reframe the goals of emancipatory struggles. See Guattari (2008: 33).