SubStance

To view Virusland, please visit: https://vimeo.com/547675919. Password: virusland. To view the entire Virusland 2020 project, visit www.virusland.org.

Science fiction in found footage. This is not the future. You could buy any of these helmets. Just look at the credits at the end of the video. You find the name of the helmet you like best. You can order online. They are usually sold in different colors. The front is made of plexiglass. But the plastic behind the head and around the face varies in shape and color. Some of these helmets make you look like a cosmonaut. But most often you would just look weird.

We have mainly used commercials, which we found on the Web. It does not mean there was no work involved. In fact, we did a lot of work on the images. We chose particular sequences in the commercials. We re-centered the image, changed the focus, and the balance of colors. The commercial focuses on the product, whereas we usually wanted to look at the human using the device, and show how happy he or she looks, a bit too happy maybe, weirdly happy. In a word, we wanted the sequences, as we have put them together, to tell a different story.

This story does not intend to be a personal narrative, an intimate film. We used only common images, images that one can easily find on the web. Unfortunately, this does not exactly mean that they belong to everyone. They may be copyrighted, and sometimes we were asked to take them down. We then replaced them with a sequence from another commercial. But they are images which have had millions of views. So they should tell us something about ourselves and the network that we form–humans, computers, algorithms, data centers, etc. These images saturate the imagination of the network. They may have the role of recurrent dreams for the network but they are not necessarily the most popular. We do not claim to document the technological imaginary of the 2020s.

We do not intend to tell the future. We do not think that we will live in this way in a few years. We do not intend to describe our actual life as sociologists would. This is not the actual present. Let's say we are making [End Page 226] science-fiction out of found footage. We are probing the imagination of the network to tell a story about certain people using a certain technology.

It is a story about people who feel very happy wearing helmets that filter the air, and who do not worry too much about the plastic they use. Maybe they have been through a pandemic, and they want to avoid viruses. It is possible. The fact is they are so happy that they play music in their earphones. These helmets go with earphones. It is a Swiss Yodel : the kind of song, with an enormous variation in tune, that shepherds sing in the mountains when they want to be heard on the other side of the valley. It is difficult to sing. It goes (in a rough translation): "A beautiful day in the mountains. So good to be in the sun. Breathing fresh air, lalilalaaaaa." You would think these people have suffered a lockdown. Or maybe they don't understand the words. They just like the melody.

Breathing fresh air. Smart helmets have a system that regulates temperature. They could not be used outside without something like that. Humans are not tropical plants, and their heads cannot be wrapped in plastic without some kind of cooling. In one of the sequences in the video, if one looks carefully, one can see small drops of sweat on the forehead of the man advertising the helmet. It could be that the refrigerator does not work very well. It must certainly use a lot of energy. Maybe these people have a spare battery in their pocket, like we sometimes have for our phones. In any case, in the world depicted by these commercials, the air they breathe is always fresh. It is also pure (which...