In the near future, violence was eradicated by a viral contagion spread through the drug VIOL, which promised to suppress destructive instincts.
Addicted to the substance, humans lost their natural defenses and, deprived of aggressive impulses, became fragile, vulnerable, teetering on the edge of extinction. The last survivors — the SHADEs — wander like specters, until their bodies inevitably collapse. Machines, modified bodies, and biotech chimeras, immune to the virus, then assume a new role. Created to protect and serve, they discover in human fragility a field for experimentation. Through the METAVIOL device, they begin extracting patterns, memories, and gestures in an attempt to preserve what remains of the human — and to claim for themselves the greatest forbidden prize: the possibility of replicating not merely as technical copies, but as truly “living” entities.
VIOL: Constructing Credibility in a Landscape of Fictions
Inspired by the film Substance, the project included a performative intervention that showed how contemporary companies create legitimacy using signals of authority. I created VIOL as a conceptual tool to question the fragility of our knowledge and the trust we place in expertise and scientific discourse.
To do this, I built a functional website www.metaviolence.com
The QR codes acted as philosophical provocations, turning public space into a kind of living laboratory, where unsuspecting passersby became participants in an investigation of how authority, branding, and scientific language can compel belief, even without concrete evidence.
Several individuals began posting different theories on Reddit about a “strange website” (metaviolence.com), which sparked growing speculation and discussion. This activity generated multiple conspiracy theories, eventually leading the YouTuber SomeOrdinaryGamers
After that, I received around 100 emails reporting “legitimate experiences with the drug,” from people across different countries and backgrounds, including photos and texts. These reports reveal something unsettling: today, reality is increasingly constructed through collective consensus rather than empirical verification. The experiences reported went beyond my performative framework and became an almost independent truth.
By becoming indistinguishable from the systems it critiques, VIOL forces us to realize that we do not live in a world of facts waiting to be discovered, but in a landscape of operative fictions competing for institutional legitimacy.
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