Sonic Memorials: Strategies of Memory, Resistance, and Rupture in Virutorium

Virutorium, a new installation work by KIT Collaboration and Robert Saucier, turns to the sonic rather than the photographic to engage the individual’s relationship to the image of deathliness in art. The project plays off of corporate fears of computer viruses as well as a public fear of bodily infection from a pandemic, and is effective in showing the seemingly overlapping spaces of several domains: life and death, virtual and real, the global and the local. Virutorium’s crucial component is the overlap, often confusing, uneven and conflictual, between these terms. The interactive robotic installation shown at Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum in Regina, Saskatchewan, invites the gallery viewer to pay his/her respects to twelve viruses that have lost their threat, subsequently loosing their vitality in the process. Approaching the individual urn lids, one sees reconstructed keyboards arranged so that their keys spell out the titles of viral subject headers from emails. Phrases such as “wanna brawl,” refer to e-mail ­subject headers that attempt to entice people to open viral attachments. On these panels, a sequence of keys can be pressed, triggering a viral eulogy, ­heavily tinged with dark humour (written from the perspective of both the preacher and the IT technician) suggesting that the viewer should mourn the viral death. 

The computer virus becomes a place of curiosity, much like a ­biological virus being stored in centres for disease control, effectively dead to culture but remaining stored in a repository. This sense of curiosity is why the dark humour of Virutorium is so effective. Remembering the viral email received and deleted, the boyish destructiveness by which these viruses were created and the hysteria produced over their threat fascinates us. The image of death within Virutorium changes our notions of how we think of the virus and its passing into and out of memory.