Virocode

Producing art since 1987, virocode, the “collaborative effort” of Peter D’Auria (b. 1966) and Andrea Mancuso (b. 1967), has maintained a mission to create “art that explores the theories, laws, and hypothesizes of science which hemorrhage into our culture, and coagulate on the individual. The work exposes scientific tenets to the chilly outside air and re-contextualizes them in the full spectrum of the narrative of everyday living.” No Plan For The Future, began serendipitously on November 9, 2016, the day after Donald J. Trump had been declared the victor of the presidential election. Ironically, a blue slushy spilled from a red cup on a white store floor conveyed the sense of despair that weighted down millions of voters. About the social media image-based project published on Instagram and exhibited at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in At This Time, virocode quotes Maurice Blanchot from The Writing of the Disaster (1986): “The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.” They go on to state:

The images here are an intersection of events, transitions of form, disruptions, destructions, and loss of origins. The crush, splash or splatters in these images serve as a marker of outright immediacy. The slowly unfolding cultural accident that we are in the midst of is a cold, incalculable lunacy, which to some yields a bittersweet punch line. 

No Plan for the Future revises political cuisine in a melee of indigestion. The imagery infiltrates the screen-time that consumes our connection between experience, recognition, and reflection by working to interrupt the amnesia perpetuated by social media platforms such as Instagram. No Plan For The Future is a resistance to a collective memory loss and presents the potential of small tragedies as reminders to us of what we have always known, that the future is uncertain (and planning is a necessity). (NW 2018)