Corrupted Blood
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound (music: Thomas Parigi, voice generation: Elevenlabs.io), 16’ 18”, 2024, France
created by Elouan Le Bars
Corrupted Blood is an experimental documentary by Elouan Le Bars revisiting a notorious virtual epidemic from the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft in 2005. Originating from a programming error that allowed a digital contagion to escape its intended confines, the outbreak swiftly infected thousands of player avatars, plunging virtual communities into chaos. Blending fragments of player testimony culled from forum archives and comment threads with digitally reconfigured 3D assets from the game itself, Le Bars’s work probes collective memory and emergent forms of digital storytelling. Corrupted Blood invites viewers to consider how crises enacted within synthetic worlds reverberate into broader cultural consciousness, interrogating the porous boundaries between virtual trauma and lived experience.
Elouan Le Bars works across video, installation, and game design, interrogating contemporary forms of staging, play, and control. His practice critically examines the influence of virtual environments, gaming culture, and shifting labor structures on self-narration and collective experience. Often incorporating documentary materials—such as testimonies, archival sound, and digital artifacts—Le Bars recontextualizes these through fictionalized and interactive frameworks, revealing how narratives are authored and identities performed in mediated spaces. Le Bars holds a DNSEP from the Paris-Cergy National School of Arts (2024) and an Engineering degree in Computer Science from Compiègne University of Technology (2021). His works have featured in significant festivals, including Cinéma du Réel (Paris, 2025), Athens Digital Art Festival (2023), and FILE Festival – Video Art (São Paulo, 2023). Recent group exhibitions include Biennale de la jeune création (La Graineterie, Houilles, 2024), Terrestrial Waves (101 Art & Design Center, Changle, China, 2024), and Sands of Self(Centre d’Art Ygrec, Aubervilliers, 2024). In 2024, he completed a residency at Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio in Japan and is currently in residence at the Villa Dufraine in Chars, with the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Le Bars lives and works in Paris.
