Lovesick, a
Future After
COVID-19

Just months before COVID-19 spread around the world, Heather Dewey-Hagborg created a virus that infects its human host with a gene that increases the production of oxytocin, the hormone often referred to as the “love hormone.”

The visiting assistant professor, worked with Integral Molecular, a biotechnology company specialized in antibody discovery, as part of a fusion of art and science research that looked at answering the question “what if love could spread like a virus?”

In her gallery showcasing the research, she designed small glass vials containing a virus she named "Lovesick" that could be broken open and consumed orally. Imagining this future, she sees individuals and groups smashing open the glass vials, consuming them, with the fluid poured in their mouths, for several seconds as the Lovesick virus takes hold.

The careful navigation of the imagined and scientific research Dewey-Hagborg has mastered led many to question the reality of the situation. Yes, she worked with a lab to create a retrovirus that actually increases the production of oxytocin. No, no one consumed it nor was it allowed to leave the safety of the lab in an active form. But her exploration of the topic allowed for a unique discovery of the state of human affection in a digital age, one that she revisited with a publication after COVID-19 broke out.

We started working on this virus, and I would say within a month start to finish it was produced and showed that it was effective in cells, in vitro. Then I was immediately thinking how will I exhibit this work, you know, it's a virus how do you exhibit a virus and what are the next steps, the next directions from that? The work was exhibited several times and kind of in different contexts around the world from New York to the Netherlands in different forms and the project was unfolding.

In the midst of that, just as I was in the middle of thinking, well ‘where does this project go next?’ came COVID-19, and came lockdown, and no more ability to travel and work with scientists and visit labs and even working in the labs on campus became impossible. Around the same time, I thought that it would be an interesting opportunity to reflect back on this project — that was about viruses in this moment where the entire globe was totally captivated by a virus; a very different virus from the one that we engineered in our lab.

(Laughs)

It is a real virus that we engineered so the project is and many of the projects that I work on are these kinds of blends of fact and fiction or real lab work and fantasy.

So the project itself is a blend of these two things but really always my work comes from a place of doing some hands on work in a lab doing experiments seeing how things really are and then imagining what the next steps would be? What might the future of that biotechnology look like?

So, in this case, I worked with a team at this company and we did experiments in the lab. We generated the construct, we inserted that into the retrovirus, we infected the human cells with the retrovirus to create these producer cells that then produce more virus, we isolated the virus from that and did various tests to see how cells got infected and had a look at the antibodies also to see if there were antibodies being produced. So we went through all of the steps that this company goes through all the time when they make their viruses. They basically make viruses for a living so they have the process down which is why it only took us a month to make the thing.

(Laughs)

That’s part of the fantasy.

No in vivo testing has been performed. So, the virus never left the lab in any active form. Basically, we deactivated the virus and then I implanted it into these hand-blown glass forms that are shaped like the different energy states of oxytocin and we filled this deactivated virus into the vials and it is literal but also a symbolic representation of the active virus.

With Lovesick, I started working on that long before COVID-19 was anything that anyone was thinking about, and I saw Lovesick really as a cure for digital detachment and alienation. I felt already for years that there was this loss of closeness taking place in society around me that was exacerbated by social media by digital culture.

And when COVID-19 happened it was like the dream of the internet really arriving, that everyone was totally kept apart, kept at home, isolated, bored, and forced to communicate through these digital technologies where we lose so much of our humanity and in particular this kind of physicalness.

Or else, we lose social interaction completely, that is sort of the alternative that we have now to communicating through Zoom or what have you. So Lovesick was in a way already finished before COVID-19. But, then seeing what happened with coronavirus really made me think back to it, back through it, and so what I fear is that this distancing that we're enacting now, which is of course totally important it's not in any way to undercut these measures, but I fear that this distancing becomes implanted in us as the kind of transgenerational trauma that will keep us away from each other. I fear that we won't really know how to come back together when it's over. We will be so used to not seeing other people in the same way as we used to, or to not touching other people and will have an aversion to basic social interaction and closeness.

So Lovesick is kind of the imagined solution to that problem. I think it's really important. I think that it's this kind of problem that preceded Coronavirus, but that is now really amplified to this extreme level.

That's the last line in the essay. I end the story by saying that people throw away their digital devices, that they're kind of lying around in these cuddly piles and dancing as this shifting mass at clubs and holding hands with strangers and opening their families also to passersby. Becoming One stands for this kind of radical openness and inclusivity that I long to see in the world after COVID-19. But it extends to beyond just what we are going through, I long to see a world where people would stop focusing so much on bloodlines and ethnicity and cultural differences and rather shed these borders between countries, borders between people, between families, between cultures, and come together.

Lovesick, a Future After COVID-19 / Words: Naser Al Wasmi / Editor: Abigail Kelly