H1N1 sticker on a newspaper stand

Mexican flu virus as social network

“H1N1 helps you connect and share with the people in your life” – stickers with this modified Facebook motto can not only found on many tea mugs and coffee cups in the Piet Zwart Institute, but also in bookstores, Dutch and Belgian trains, traffic lights and public toilets in and outside Rotterdam, restaurants and other places where people might share each other’s viruses.

They are the first trimester project of Darija Medic, student in the Networked Media programme, and a good example of a media project without computers or electronics. She reasons that “the more the virus is spread, present, mutating, and becoming the virus per se, the more different reactions are born and mutating – turning the virus into a media monster, memetically infected with conspiracy theories and irrational behaviour. [...] Changed perception turns the virtual into true reality, and
changes our experience of everyday life.”

Darija’s project, called The Us in Virus, is accompanied by her essay In Sickness and Health that investigates the impact of epidemic scares on the openness of societies, along the examples of both H1N1 and Ambroggio
 Lorenzetti’s 14th century painting of Siena.

H1N1 sticker in a public toilet