Wearable Virus Shields: From Futuristic Dystopias to Actual Dread

Several dystopian design projects aimed at protecting and isolating users have been developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, including masks, visors, body bubbles, and other types of shields that allow avoiding actual contact with the surrounding space and with other people who could be possible carriers of the virus. The essay explores the uncanny analogies between speculative design ideas based on futuristic scenarios on one side, and practical design solutions, both self-made and mass-marketed, developed to cope with actual risks of contamination. A brief history of wearable protections against “contagions” will be outlined, with references to the evolution of cloth face masks in medicine, Hugo Gernsback’s 1920s inventions, the paraphernalia related to the nuclear age and the Cold War, and 1960s radical design projects such as those by Austrian collective Haus-Rucker-Co. and Italian artist Ugo La Pietra. If, as suggested by Fredric Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (1994; 2003), then it is time to get hold of masks and plastic shields to prevent infection while shopping or getting inside a body bubble to have the delusion that we can still live our pre-COVID lifestyle. American indie band the Flaming Lips suggested the latter hilarious option with a quarantined performance for the TV program The Late Night Show, with musicians and audience standing inside individual bubbles. Ranging from humoristic to fashionable to functional, these wearable inventions to prevent airborne respiration droplets from touching the user’s face have become a symbol of our time. The essay will consider issues related to dread, dystopia, and the impact of media technologies on our imagination of a future in which we’ll live alienated, interacting with each other from behind screens.