viz.

This post is fascinating!  It reminded me of an electronic hypertext/animation
Carrier:  Becoming Symborg from the Electronic Literature Collection. Students in my class last semester found this piece particularly alienating, since it invited you to identify with the Hepatitis C virus; entering the site actually requires you to meld with the virus, which is described in sexualized, haunting terms.  Like the aesthetic beauty of the H1N1 sculptures, Carrier violates a range of sensibilities about disease and the body.  The humanism of the Carrier piece, finally, is held in the patient narratives embedded more deeply in the hypertext.  If you explore the site, you find patient voices, accessed through links, who are grappling with diagnosis, helping you understand why we need a less antithetical, more wholistic concept of disease.  The author description says, "We are lead through the site by sHe, an intelligent viral agent, who crosses our species boundary, penetrating our cellular core, repositioning viral infection as positive biological merging with the flesh."  I find the site strange, but truly progressive.

Thanks so much for showing us this unique and beautiful art.  You raise the excellent question: “why does one get a sense of frisson, a shudder of illicit pleasure, at viewing these sculptures? What does it mean to grow weak-kneed when confronted with the beautiful form of the smallpox virus, which killed an estimated 500 million human beings in the 20th century?”

I think the way we see these exquisite sculptures today, as humans become increasingly concerned about the environment, may be different from the way we would have viewed them several years ago.   We humans are slowly becoming aware that we  are not the raison d’etre of the planet nor the pinnacle of its evolution.   These little microbes were here millions of years before us, and they will long outlive us.  They’ve survived every planetary catastrophe, dinosaur extinction included.  We are a tiny blip in their long, elegant evolutionary history.  

Maybe the sculptures’ frisson is partly fear, as horror movies are pleasurable for some people. Virus’s ability to destroy us via disease is only one demonstration of their power over us.  The entire planet belongs to the microbes, not to us.  That’s scary.

But we can also see this from a more positive perspective.  We love stories of the underdogs winning out: David against Goliath, the scrappy Minute Men against the seemingly invincible British army.  

Maybe if we ally ourselves with the David-power of “simple” life forms, they will help rescue us from the Goliath of a mess we’ve made of the planet.  Fungi have been found growing all over the ruins of Chernobyl, feeding off its radiation http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/duncan/17611/.   Researchers in California have discovered that mushrooms will grow on oil spills, transforming pollution into healthy life: http://fungiperfecti.com/mycotech/mycova.html. Microbes flourish in every seemingly hostile environment on earth, including deep underwater in the boiling hot volcanic vents of the mid-oceanic trenches, feeding off what we humans think of as toxic minerals.  Nature, “imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth.” http://biomimicryinstitute.org/about-us/what-is-biomimicry.html

So I think it’s perfectly appropriate to marvel at Jerram’s sculptures as celebrations of the tremendous, elegant, wonderful power of microbes.