Lovesick Futures

Heather Dewey-Hagborg, artist and biohacker who is interested in art as research and technological critique.

Lovesick Future (2020) is the outcome of an art residency completed in the spring of 2019 with Science Center, a biotechnology incubator, and Integral Molecular, a vaccine and drug discovery company based in Philadelphia.

When the artist first entered the virology lab, she felt immediately at home surrounded by the familiar instruments of molecular biology, peering in at a room humming with incubators full of human cells. This was exactly the place to think about intimacy in the biotechnological future.

Together with the scientists at Integral Molecular, she invented a custom retrovirus which infects human cells with a gene that increases the production of oxytocin. The hormone oxytocin is implicated in feelings of love and bonding, monogamy and devotion, and the promotion of empathy and connection. She envisioned the work as an activist intervention to spread affection and attachment and to combat alienation, disconnection, and hate. Lovesick is a device for engaging utopia, a framing mechanism for envisioning a post-digital and post-coronavirus future. It is an effort to inspire optimism and enthusiasm for dreaming up a plurality of paths radically different from the one that passively confronts us.