GLOBAL VIRAL. THE VIRUS METAPHOR is a film essay about viruses: biological viruses, computer viruses and linguistic viruses. It is about viral strategies, codes and metaphors.

The journey takes us from a discourse on epidemics, with the Great Plague of the 14th Century as its starting point, to state hygiene programmes and medical research on pathogenic agents, on to cyber terrorism and data contamination and further to infectious ideas, thoughts and words in religion, advertising and the media.

The authors examine the question as to why the metaphor virus has become so popular today, and how talk of contamination and infection, foreign bodies and sleepers leads to political and social exclusion.

A virus is a complex conceptual structure, whose effects go far beyond biological pathogenic agents. A virus is seen as being an intrusive element in cells, in the individual body, the collective body and the global body; it is the hostile foreign agent per se, and at the same time a synonym for extreme flexibility and perceived creative-intelligent behaviour both a glittering and a demonic protagonist.