© samantha krukowski Virus Culture | Replication Structure 2002 text from a talk given at Chaos and the City

It was a late night about a year ago. The weather was turning cold, I had the flu and could not rest with so many aches and pains. Thinking about the war taking place in my body made me feel worse--I was thumbing through a lot of virology books at the time and was imagining that influenza had jumped out of a book into my body. To make myself think of other things, I put Laurie Anderson on. I forwarded to the track you just heard, the one called Language is a Virus. I listened and laughed, amused at my own effort to intellectualize the bug in my body out into the linguistic arena. Language is a virus, you see. I am infecting you with it right now. And many other things in the world are too. For those of you who haven’t been in a scientific classroom for a while, let me do a very quick refresher course on viruses and how they work. Please note that this refresher course is being given to you by a non-scientist. Expect poetic and theoretical interruptions of what is otherwise considered textbook material. If there are scientists in the audience, please roar in outrage at any bad science, but understand I am trying my best to navigate a complex field and that my particular brain type gets a kick out of trying to establish relationships between things like misrepresentation and mutation.

A virus is an intracellular parasite. Viruses enter cells, direct the cell’s machinery to transcribe, translate, and replicate their genomes, and then exit the cell to establish new infections. Viruses contain either deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA), never both. These nucleic acids are storage units for hereditary information. The herpes virus is a DNA virus, the polio virus is an RNA virus. Viruses have a number of parts: the genome (either DNA or RNA), the nucleocapsid (proteins that coat the genome), the capsid (an outer protein shell) and the envelope (an outer lipid coat derived from the cell in which the virus replicates.) The envelope is not present on all viruses, and those that contain envelopes are usually less stable than those that do not. Viruses replicate in six distinct steps. 1. Attachment of the virus to the host cell surface. Attachment usually involves the specific recognition of a cell surface structure (a protein or a carbohydrate group) by a component of the virus surface. For an infection to begin, there must be some kind of recognition between the infector and the infectee. 2. Injection of the viral nucleic acid into the host cell cytoplasm. Injection is often carried out by structures in a virus tail whose function is to get the nucleic acid into the cell. The viral container does not enter the host cell. Injection = invasion. Alien information and structure is transferred to the interior of the cell by a specific device. The transporter mechanism does not participate in the invasion. 3. Replication of the viral nucleic acid. The parental nucleic acid is used as a template for synthesis of progeny nucleic acid molecules. The host cell gives the virus directions for replication, it provides the plans and the structure for its own potential destruction and for that of its host. 4. Expression of viral genes. This is an act of translation. Host cell structures are decoding and rewriting cites for viral genetic information. 5. Assembly of progeny virus. Viral nucleic acid and proteins self-assemble inside the host cell to produce mature, infectious virions. Host cell proteins and nucleic acids are not usually included in mature virions. The viruses become independent, the host is no longer necessary to nor physically included in their existence. 6. Release of mature virus from the host cell. This release typically occurs when the host cell disintigrates releasing hundreds of mature virions into the extracellular space. If a virus causes cell death, this cytopathic effect is seen in the whole animal…for example polio virus destroys anterior horn cells in the spinal column, causing paralysis. Some viruses do not cause cell death but instead provoke an immune system response in the host that is pathological or they transform cells, creating malignancies. The host is no longer necessary and is discarded. The virus is teeming and free.

Take a look at HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, caught in action by a scanning electron microscope. HIV virions are massing outside a cell. They are spherical, 80-100 nanometers in diameter, and have evenly dispersed spikes on their surface.

Here the virions are attaching to the cell wall.

And here, the virus is budding out from the interior of the host cell, and finally breaks free to repeat the process over and over again. The moral of this lesson: an understanding of how viruses exploit cellular machinery to replicate their genomes is the key to the control and manipulation of viruses. While the very word virus most often conjures negative associations, viruses are also powerful research tools for dissecting cellular processes. They offer promise as expression and delivery systems for vaccines and gene therapy,

Before a virus can replicate inside a body, however, it requires a vector. The black rat was a carrier of the Yersinia Pestis bacillus, the cause of Bubonic plague. But it was not the vector for this microorganism—the vector was the flea, which would transfer the bacillus to a host via its saliva and a good bite. The vector for Lyme Disease is the tick Borrelia burgdorferi. The vector for Malaria is the Anopheles Gambiae mosquito. A dirty syringe can be a vector, as can be an air conditioning system. Vectors need not be alive. I imagine you’re all a bit concerned about one mosquito with white bands on its legs and the name of Culex pipiens. I am. This summer birds started to die outside my studio. Strangely, they all appeared in the same place, just about two feet away from the sliding glass door, smack in the middle of the deck. There would be no bird, and then, there would be a dead bird. Dead birds were falling from the sky. They were not blue jays and they were not pigeons…these were the birds with a message: west nile virus. When a blue jay did finally fall from the sky in this immaculate death ritual, I was a good citizen and called the health department. “Oh,” the woman who answered the phone said, “we already know it’s here. Just throw the bird out.” Amazing, too, that West Nile Virus was first positively identified for the first time in the Western Hemisphere in the late summer of 1999.

Do you recognize this vector? Meet Sam Walton.

This is the disease he spreads. How does the Wal-Mart virus work? Each Wal-Mart is situated on a boundary line, a cell wall that is a town or city center. It attaches to a community via a series of negotiations that typically involve a recognition of the jobs and resources Wal-Mart can bring as well as apparent concern for the well being of community resources already in place.

Wal-Mart injects itself into a community with particular attention to that community’s needs and character. Each Wal-Mart, though standardized in appearance, promotes itself as a local store that recognizes and supports hometown identity. Each person who enters a Wal-Mart is welcomed personally by a team of People Greeters, each Wal-Mart store honors a graduating high school senior with a college scholarship, Wal-Marts sponsor bake sales to benefit local charities, Wal-Mart employees (called associates) determine where charitable funds are donated. Mr. Walton said: "each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community." These internal local acts do not conceal the fact that Wal-Mart stores have no external local character. A Wal-Mart brings money to places and people that don’t have much; this is an anesthetic against the true effect of the store on the economic environment. With a Wal-Mart in the picture, other retailers typically cannot survive. Wal-Mart leaks into the community, the community leaks into Wal-Mart. The membrane between them disappears, one becomes the other. Wal-Mart commercials currently running on television show numerous employees mouthing the same line: “I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t come to Wal-Mart.” Ostensibly, Wal-Mart can be a way of life, or even, life itself.

Essential to Wal-Mart's retail model are its multiple distribution centers, invasive tumors in orbit. A typical distribution center is more than one million square feet, the equivalent of 10 Wal-Mart retail stores or 24 football fields. At a typical distribution center, 500 tractor-trailers of merchandise are loaded and shipped in a day. The machinery of viral spread is well-oiled, Wal-Mart’s parts and systems in constant proliferation. Apparently the Wal-Mart virus is not so powerful abroad. Wal-Mart failed in Germany, for example, where German consumers avoid travelling to a Wal-Mart hypermarket to do non-food shopping when most inner city centers abound with stores. In addition, the American Wal-Mart way with morning cheers and other exercises was not well received by workers, who wanted to be respected as professionals and not treated as circus clowns.

A business does not have to be an individual virus to be viral; it can have a particular strategy that is. Viral marketing, for example, became popular in the 1990s. The aim of this marketing practice is not to market the consumer, but to maximize the spread of information from customer to customer. In his book Unleashing the IdeaVirus, Seth Godin identifies a series of steps for making an idea infectious, examines what makes a powerful 'sneezer', how 'hives' work, and applies the concepts of critical velocity, vector, medium, smoothness, persistence, and amplifiers. The image-type of this gap ad is sufficiently familiar to us that the logo can be minimized; the relationship between the company and the ubiquitous blue cotton shirt is established sufficiently such that any blue cotton shirt anywhere might be a sign for the gap. Godin’s book was positioned on the back of another by Douglas Rushkoff called Media Virus. Rushkoff's contended that media viruses are not metaphors; they are viruses. He argued that the media can be perceived as an autonomous entity or 'other' in its own right, a single organism or sensory network of the planet. He postulates the 'hive mind' of humankind is reflecting and becoming aware of itself in the media, and that media viruses are mechanisms of correcting its faulty code. This code is made up of memes, ideas, behaviors, styles, or usages that spread from person to person within a culture. Rushkoff says these viruses can be constructed consciously; they can be 'bandwagon' viruses, as some interest group hijacks an issue (say the release of prisoners back into the community) for their own ends, or they can be self-generating, when society has hit upon a weakness or ideological vacuum. The zoologist Richard Dawkins is usually credited with coining the term 'meme' in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. The idea of a cultural unit of information had been proposed by others prior, including sociologist Gabriel Tarde and Belgian essayist Maurice Maeterlinck and theorist Douglas Hofstadter. If you dig a bit, you find a lot more history for this little word and some interesting historical metapatterns. Historical romance novelist Robert W. Chamber's short story collection The King in Yellow (1895) was the model for H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book that has inspired horror books and films, role-playing games, and rumor panics. Chambers' stories explore the unsettling psychological effects of a mysterious book that "spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists." George Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950) explored mythic constructs lingering beneath complex words constructed of combinations of Armenian, Russian, French, and English. Gurdjieff conceived memetics as part of a biopsychosociospiritual system, proposing the 'legominism' as a form in which "ancient wisdom is [culturally] transmitted beneath a form ostensibly intended for quite a different purpose." Gurdjieff suggested that these truths encompassed architecture, archaeological artifacts, dance, and mythic folklore. He believed that this knowledge was "not preserved in books but in the experiences of people." William Burroughs theorized that language is actually a living virus, an organism that inhabits our thought processes. To Burroughs, when we speak, we are spreading a disease of thought control belonging to that virus. In the late 50's, Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin developed a method that they believed could defeat this virus, a method they called "cut-up". Apparently Gysin stumbled upon the technique while cutting pictures with a razor over a newspaper. Recombinations of the newspaper parts yielded new, and uninfected, meaning. While this kind of technique interested many artists before Burroughs, it is Burroughs’ belief that cut-ups were viral vaccines that interests me. Burroughs writes about viruses in a number of his books. Cities of the Red Night is an apocalyptic novel about a population afflicted with a radioactive virus. Burroughs said in an interview about this books that evolutionary change may be “biological mutation [over] one or two generations, possibly through a virus. No virus we know at present time acts in this way - that is to say, would affect biologic alterations, then genetics. But such a virus may have existed in the past.” And in The Place of Dead Roads he writes some pretty amazing passages, like this one: “Now your virus is an obligate cellular parasite, and my contention is that what we call evil is quite literally a virus parasite occupying a certain area which we may term the RIGHT centre. The mark of a basic shit is that he has to be right. And right here we must make a diagnostic distinction between a hard-core virus-occupied shit and a plain ordinary no-good son of a Bitch.”

I spend a lot of time in my studio watching media infect each other and trying to identify vectors. I buy petri dishes to hold resins and oils so I can keep them and use them as ongoing experiments. I like to encounter what I call the resistance of a medium, when moving imagery or objects from one medium to another requires decoding and transcription. I encourage all kinds of cross-pollination…I isolate forms from paintings and transfer them to film; I project video to start new paintings; I develop models based on forms that appear in either paintings or video, I write about any of it. Any medium is a potential breeding ground for content that will contaminate and infect works in process.