HALFLIFE
(2021)
author(s): shasti
published in: Research Catalogue
This exposition posits art as a form of contagious divination, a glimpse into the multiplicity of possible futures, and an examination of artists' ability to detect momentum towards unavoidable outcomes.
In 2014, I was selected by curator Heather Pesanti to participate in the City of Toronto’s annual Nuit Blanche festival, an overnight public art event spanning twelve hours in multiple neighborhoods that draws over a million people from the surrounding regions.
Spurred by my concerns about the inescapable gravity of mobile electronic media and "viral culture," my work was to be a performance premised on contagion, pointing to the monumental role that electronic media had assumed in mediating our direct experience, and the civic and societal fallout I believed would ensue. Little did I suspect how bizarrely prescient the work would turn out to be.
On October 6th, 2014, one hundred glowing “carriers,” dressed in fluorescent hazmat suits, wearing fluorescent LED-wired helmets in the dodecahedral geometric shape of an adenovirus, dispersed throughout the City of Toronto, each "testing" and “infecting” at least one hundred festivalgoers by marking their faces and hands with “spots” “lesions” and “rashes” using surgical swabs dipped into a beaker of invisible UV-reactive ink. Each "test subject" was then gifted a small UV pen lamp with built-in reactive ink marker and instructed to "infect" and "test" ten others.
It is estimated that HALFLIFE attained an "R-naught" value of ten, and through this performance, affected approximately one hundred thousand people.
Images of the performance went viral on Instagram for seventy-two hours, during which Toronto General Hospital admitted their first and only suspected Ebola case.
