Exposition

HALFLIFE (2021)

shasti
Shasti O'Leary-Soudant
open exposition

About this exposition

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.
typeresearch exposition
keywordscontagion, performance, Performance art, Sculpture, artwork, artistic research, art process, art practice, public art, public urban art, public engagement, relational aesthetics, relationality, Virus, viral media, contagious, contamination
date18/11/2020
published27/01/2021
last modified27/01/2021
statuspublished
share statusprivate
affiliationUniversity at Buffalo
copyrightShasti O'Leary Soudant
licenseAll rights reserved
languageEnglish
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1050260/1050261
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/rc.1050260
published inResearch Catalogue
external linkhttp://shastiolearysoudant.com


Simple Media

id name copyright license
1050264 HALFLIFE1 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1050269 HALFLIFE2 Clifton Li All rights reserved
1050272 HALFLIFE3 Clifton Li All rights reserved
1050277 media1 copyright holder All rights reserved
1050279 HALFLIFE4 Clifton Li All rights reserved
1050281 HALFLIFE5 Clifton Li All rights reserved
1050293 TITLE Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1050300 HEADLINE Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1050307 HALFLIFE7 Chris Harper All rights reserved
1050308 HALFLIFE8 Chris Harper All rights reserved
1050310 HALFLIFE9 Clifton Li All rights reserved
1050311 HALFLIFE10 Nick Wons All rights reserved
1050313 HALFLIFE11 Chris Harper All rights reserved
1050314 HEADLINE2 Shasti O'Lear Soudant All rights reserved
1056242 PREP1 copyriShasti O'Leary Soudantght holder All rights reserved
1056244 PREP2 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056256 PREP3 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056367 PREP4 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056368 PREP5 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056369 PREP6 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056395 PREP7 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056406 media2 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056637 media3 copyright holder All rights reserved
1056671 media4 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved
1056733 media5 Shasti O'Leary Soudant All rights reserved

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