Living Viral Tattoos is a series of sculptural prototypes featuring the design of  bruises on human skin made with lentivirus, a synthetic third generation non-pathogenic clone of HIV strain 1 virus. These sculptural prototypes are preserved separately in four jars of paraformaldehyde and displayed in a glass encasing. The presentation of the Living Viral Tattoos provokes a critical public engagement with the perceptual limitations (and potentials) of wet bodies, microbes and bioinformatic tools.

The movement of biological viruses is, in this work, rendered “positive” and can be observed to the naked eye as bluish-brownish bruises manifested on donated ex-plant human breast tissue and pigskin purchased from a butcher shop.

 This project uses and applies the very same scientific protocols and biotechnology used in biomedical and experimental scientific research. This engagement can be seen as an intervention into the scientific imperative by presenting an aesthetic object that self-reflexively critiques its own reliance on colour and other technoscientific visualization techniques that are the current standard in creating, representing and generating scientific facts.  The Living Viral Tattoos play with the ambiguous nature of the bruise and scientific diagnostic tools.  On the one hand a bruise signals an interruption and impact on or within the structure of tissue. Such interludes may be perceptible as colour on the surface of the skin, and connote damage or healing to cellular structures from a biomedical perspective. Bruises can also be imperceptible when the molecular makeup of tissue is altered but not demarcated through colour.

In the post-biological age, where computer databases and electronic information merge with wet tissue, the impact of such encounters is often reflected to the public through digital imaging or other forms of visual representation.  Living Viral Tattoos troubles such modes of representation and reflects on the how bioinformatic and biotechnological processes impact wet and fleshy animal-human tissue.

This work was produced during a ten-month residency at SymbioticA as part of field research for a PhD dissertation entitled Moist Media Documents: Viral movement in performance and documents. It is funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture. The immunohistochemical staining protocol used in this project was developed by Dr. Stuart Hodgetts.

Credits:

Tagny Duff  in collaboration with Dr. Stuart Hodgetts, Ionat Zurr, Oron Catts, Maria Grade Godinho and Dr. Jill Muhling with contributions from Guy Ben Ary, and Alicia King, and the support of SymbioticA, the Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts, situated in the Anatomy and Human Biology Department at The University of Western Australia.