VIRUS (2010–2039)

An artwork that is conceived as a 30-year project, beginning in 2010 and ending in 2039. This text combines prediction (in italics) and chronology.

- BHARTI KHER

One Virus will be released a year to mark an entry into space somewhere.

Like a time-tunnel that you can climb into, or a vortex, or a womb or a safe hole.

A mutation of color and pattern so light, a virus so subtle, that no one will notice its slow and transformative essence.

Except you.

You have chosen to be a part of this project that will culminate when our children have grown older and have left home. You and I may or may not be alive. Our lives will have changed in ways we cannot imagine now. Wars may have been waged or natural disasters that wreak havoc on civilizations will push humanity to rethink its relationships with other living beings and our planet. Cities may never sleep again. People who live longer than before can roam spaces of changing realities that have been mapped digitally and created in the mind.

This text will continue to change as I meet time and add narratives.

Here are some excerpts.

VIRUS I 2010

The first artificial life-form, Mycoplasma laboratorium, is created. It is a new series of bacterium, with a man-made genetic code, originating on a computer and placed on a synthetic chromosome inside an empty cell. Using its new “software”, the cell can generate proteins and produce new cells. Wikileaks, an online publisher of anonymous and classified material, leaks to the public over 90,000 internal reports about the United States-led involvement in the war against Afghanistan from 2004–10. More follow. I am 41.

VIRUS II 2011