This monograph examines the cultural, material and artistic significance of viruses and viral phenomena, emphasizing the struggles and successes of science and technology to tame their elusive nature and behavior, and the potential of art-based and cross-disciplinary collaborations to shed new light on, and better interpret and communicate their complex making and intense entanglement with the world at large.
Viral Behaviors has two objectives: first, it offers an onto-epistemological assessment of viruses to unravel their extraordinary mobility across disciplines and their intersection with all aspects of culture, rather than their import within one specific disciplinary realm or one aspect of culture. Second, it shows how the numerous attempts by artists, scientists and professionals to tackle, represent and appropriate viruses and their intricate dynamism will lead to new nuanced and sophisticated understandings of these substances and their related phenomena, and reveals the contribution of non- measurable or non-traditional practices in their construction and dissemination.
The book asks whether embracing the complexity of viruses and viral phenomena, rather than obsessively measuring, dissecting, or precisely mapping their parts and manifestations, may generate new methodological directions to improve the comprehension of, and ease the apprehension towards, viral substances and other similarly puzzling and complicated phenomena. The artists and creative practitioners contained in this book perfectly illustrate this new approach. But what are the risks?
“An insightful, thoughtful, and complex engagement with the relations among people and the entangled assemblages of contagious phenomena we call ‘viruses’—charting vital points of attachment from art, to science, to theory.”
— Alexis Shotwell , Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Carleton University, Canada
“Tracing viruses and virality through science, technology, medicine, and metaphor, this book draws on the powerful illuminations of art to consider how viruses can help us move beyond our dichotomies and productively contemplate the way we individually and collectively choose to live in the world.”
— Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. Virological Ambiguities
3. Navigating the Unfamiliar: strategies of coping
4. Imagining Viruses
5. From a Distance
6. Situated Epidemiologies
7. Affective Epidemiologies
8. Breaking the Binaries, Embracing the Viral
9. Towards new viral methodologies
