The Perfect Virus

The Perfect Virus is a project that investigates the intersections between digital culture, ecological crisis, and human responsibility. Starting from a shared feeling of cynicism and helplessness in the face of the climate emergency, our team set out to explore the question: What if the most dangerous virus on the planet is us?

Inspired by both biological metaphors and meme theory, we conceptualized humanity as the “perfect virus”—a force that spreads, adapts, and exploits its environment, often without regard for its host. Similarly, we explored how digital memes—coined by Richard Dawkins as cultural ideas that replicate through imitation—also spread like viruses amongst people. While memes can inform and mobilize, they can also oversimplify, distort, and overwhelm, mirroring the chaotic information landscape we live in today.

Through experiments in visual design, social media testing, and exhibition research, we developed a range of meme-based communications to test how facts and exaggerations circulate. We found that emotional, even absurdist content often spreads more effectively than truth. We used this to create a variety of tangible memes that we printed onto seed paper to see if we could reframe the meme as a tool not of distraction, but of regeneration and responsibility.

Our final outcome, Ground Yourself, is a workshop and interactive installation using handmade, plantable seed-paper memes—transforming ephemeral internet culture into a slow, living form of climate action. Participants are invited to select a message that resonates with them and plant it, symbolizing a small act of care and responsibility.
The idea is about separating ourselves from the overwhelming influx of information on the climate crisis that is impossible to fix at an individual level and instead focusing on what we can actually do for ourselves with just a small act of care. Change is hard to orchestrate at an individual level, especially trying to tackle something like the climate crisis, but in encouraging people to take one small act of care, we hope this can lead to overall good.

This project doesn’t claim to solve the climate crisis. Instead, it offers a reframing: moving from nihilism to nurture, from viral overload to grounded action. We aim to give people a way to engage meaningfully with overwhelming information—reminding us that small, tangible acts can still grow into collective change.