In Chronic Expectation, Simon Denny reconstructs the public discourse about an alleged scientific discovery, which for a short time promised insights into the hitherto unexplained Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from which 17 million people worldwide suffer. Between 2009 and 2011, journals across the English-speaking world picked up on a possible link between the illness and the retrovirus XMRV, which structurally resembles HIV. It was later discovered, however, that XMRV was the product of contaminated samples – a laboratory-derived virus with no danger of infecting people – debunking the story which so many journals had reported.
Chronic Expectation reconstructs the complex interplay between the politics of media persuasion and scientific discourses, which together shape the production and distribution of medical knowledge. The installation, which takes the form of an archival project collecting these journal articles, reveals how digital image processing and other hybrid forms of media presentation play an ever more fundamental role in the ostensibly objective quest for truth.