#synchronicityofparasites: Parasite on Parade - Glasgow West End Festival 2010

zaterdag 16 november 2019

Parasite on Parade - Glasgow West End Festival 2010

Parasite Project

"A few months ago my friend Jamie approached me with an idea he'd be harbouring of participating in the Glasgow West End Festival to help raise public awareness of the work he and his colleagues do researching tropical parasites at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology.
The plan was simple, but definitely crazy: to build a giant trypanosome float for the festival's parade, and to hand out comics to explain what was going on."

"On 13th June 2010 a giant fabric trypanosome joined the Glasgow West End Festival Parade.
The project was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Glasgow University Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology, as well as the Glasgow University Faculty of Biomedical and Life Sciences.
A free comic was distributed at the event, which can be downloaded for free from here:
https://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/iii/wcip/publicengagement/wcipcomics/

http://edwardmaross.blogspot.com/2010/06/parasite-project.html

Synchronicity or the happening by chance of two or more related or similar events at the same time, is often positioned within the realm of parapsychology and magical thinking, or with some kind of quantum effect crossing over into the classical world.

Synchronicity can appear to point towards some kind of hidden or unknown connectivity underneath events.

In the case of #synchronicityofparasites, parasites operating as pre-conscious perceptual filters, installing a bias for meaningful events, or parasites as biological or network tricksters hiding causal links out of sight of the scientific apparatus or categories, turn the concept into another effective parasitic strategy.

In a way #synchronicityofparasites itself acts as a parasite that embodies the hidden link between all those more or less isolated parasite projects in science, art and literature and turns them into a kind of decentralized para-culture.

Many of the posts refer to a series of academic papers on parasites, parasitically appropriated and printed to a zine format.

This to promote academic writing within the format of the zine and turn the zine into a tool for (self)-education and knowledge production. But also to lift this knowledge out of its academic niche and into an active social cultural network. I feel relatively free to do so because I think that anyone promoting a positive view on parasitism cannot be too rigid about being parasited upon without contradicting themselves: In a way, the parasite incorporates its own creative commons. At the same time the library also acknowledges the precariousness involved in parasitism. Our zines are not sold for profit, mass produced or randomly distributed.

#marc_van_elburg, www.zinedepo.nl

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