Visualizing GOING VIRAL: reflections on our logo

The core themes of GOING VIRAL are ephemeral phenomena: music and emotions, in the specific situation of health crises. In our research, we are constantly faced with the difficulty of putting these ephemeral phenomena into words – and binding them in the media of language and writing. How we can translate our research into a visual form had not been central to our work. In recent weeks, however, we have been thinking about it – and while searching for a logo for GOING VIRAL, we discussed various options and their pros and cons. We wanted something that would show the main purpose of GOING VIRAL and at the same time emphasise the complexity with which we approach our research questions; something that would give us an identity as a team and also something that each of us, with our own individual research, could relate to.

Thinking about these surprisingly difficult questions was the first step towards our logo. We are very grateful to graphic design studio Bakform for guiding us through this process – and for creating a visual manifestation of GOING VIRAL that encompasses everything that was important to us – and that is more than the sum of its parts.

Of particular importance to us were firstly, of course, our three main topics music, emotions and pandemics, each in their qualities as cultural-historical phenomena, as social practices and as embodied experiences; secondly, the historical and also cross-historical character of our research; thirdly, the diversity of methods and theories, the interdisciplinary approaches and the multitude of perspectives that our work entails; and finally, a sense of bewilderment, wonder and surprise that we know our results to provoke in our audiences.

This logo is “about different shapes that can be read in different ways. Depending on your point of view, you can see people in it, but also virus-like structures, there is distance and closeness, and also different faces, sometimes laughing, sometimes sad,” explained Bakform founder Patrick Hallé the first version of this logo in an email. Gradually, we also saw medicine doses and pills, musical notes, droplets, singing and breathing. We have seen communication and relationships between forms and people, connections and oppositions, activity and passivity, and we have felt movement as well as stasis.

While these are all more or less concrete connotations and associations of meaning, the logo also has a high degree of abstraction that leaves the observer slightly puzzled and stimulates reflection.

It was an amazing experience to see how quickly the entire team was able to agree on a logo and how each individual team member – regardless of their disciplinary background, their research focus and the historical period or geographical and cultural region on which their case studies are centred – was able to find their research in it. Logos create identity – but identity also clearly materialises in logos.

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