Virulava
The Kit Collaboration + Robert Saucier

Virulava is the second joint project by The Kit Collaboration + Robert Saucier. Their first project, Infrasense, was a large-scale sound installation that toured 11 galleries in Canada, UK, USA and Belgium from 2004 – 2006. The project dealt with the cultural economy of paranoia surrounding the word ‘virus’ in its biological (sexual), computational (coding) and capital (marketing) forms.

Virulava is an interactive robotic sound installation, a kinetic and aural work that advances themes originated in the Infrasense project. This new project explores the extensive and pervasive cultural dynamics of the ‘virus’ and seeks to highlight how far viral systems and models are influencing bodily and computer based communication systems, modes of capitalism and socio-sexual relations, ultimately contemplating how we construct cultural memories about transient entities that we consider detrimental to our livelihoods.

About the Artists
The KIT Collaboration has produced numerous interactive robotic installations for galleries and museums, sound and video projects for new-media festivals and site-specific works for offsite locations across Europe, the Middle East, North America, Australasia and Japan. It has also produced internationally touring exhibitions and been curated into group shows for galleries and biennials since its conception as a collaborative unit in 1995. Invited to undertake residencies in universities, sculpture parks, production units and to research its work, The KIT Collaboration develops its projects from a wide range of situated practices. // kitcollaboration.net

Robert Saucier is originally from the province of New Brunswick, and currently lives and works in Montréal, Canada, where he is a professor of sculpture and media art at the University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM). Since he began his professional practice in 1979, Saucier has produced artworks for many solo exhibitions and has been curated into group exhibitions for galleries, museums and festivals in Canada, USA and Europe. He is an active member of Hexagram (Art and Technology Research and Development Centre) in Montréal, which funded portions of his recent research in the robotic arts.