# CAMIT Grant Draft

## Name of collaborators (if any):

## Is this project affiliated with a student organization, DLC, or other group? If so, please note the group name here:

## Brief summary of proposed project
>Your project proposal should tell us the who, what, where, why, when, and how of your project. Maximum 1500 characters. (between 214 words and 375 words )

#### Please give a short description of your project, including the final form that it will take. (50 words)
> Note: Imagine a juror reading one hundred proposals. The first line needs to catch their attention!

- play with the current value system
- virus circulation, dease identification
- context of the identification
- Imagine circulation of disease identity
- usage of monetary system to circulate

#### Please tell us about your project in longer detail, including the final form that it will take. (250 words)

- proof of identify (process)
- owning the positive coin
- distributing to different labs and ngos

#### Place your work in context so that we may better evaluate it. For instance, what are the main influences upon your work? How does your past work inform your current project? (150 words)

- often work on identity (political identity, gender identity), how about disease identity
- can identity be quantified? instead of qualified?
- first version: in Taipei, second version: in Beijing, third version: in Boston MIT
- prevelent in Batswana and many places around the world
- the change of HIV narrative: HIV genome bends over backwards to help virus take over cells
- how we talk, experiment and reverse the stigma from inside out?

#### How does your project take an original and imaginative approach to content and form? Please be as specific as possible. (100 words)

- It is said that there is one mysterious currency hidden in the deep jungle of the digital world, people are willing to trade it with their money, time, and even their lives.

Positive Coin is a participatory art project exhibited in Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-Lab) and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Taipei. “Positive” refers to HIV positive, and how HIV-positive people can bring positive meaning to their stigmatized disease. After consulting doctors, psychiatrists, and AIDS activists, our team designed a cryptocurrency with the bionic features of HIV. “How to kill the virus?”, “How to defeat the illness?” Susan Sontag depicts that we often use military vocabularies to describe diseases. As an artist, I gathered a team to compose the parallel analogies on the circulation of disease with trading. By combing the notion of currency with the disease, we also reverse the preconceptions on values. Our team gamified the following eight elements in Positive Coin for project participants developing a better understanding of AIDS identity:

1. Digital Wallet
The participants can purchase the coins online with New Taiwan Dollars. Participants can collect their own physical-digital wallet at C-Lab, which serve as the exchange. When Participants scan the QR code on their digital wallet, the current amount of their Positive Coins is shown.

2. Coin
There are four types of coins randomly distributed to the audiences by the exchange, each coin has particular bionic features symbolizing the four HIV subtypes. Different coins increase daily with different interest rates, just as how the virus constantly grows. However, the digital wallet will expire every 14-21 days, participants need to revisit the exchange and pay a handling fee in order to revive its wallet. Such act symbolize how HIV-positive people revisit the hospital, in order to prevent the outbreak of further complication.

3. Community
Each currency has its user community. AIDS now is a chronic disease, people also developed its identity and community. Our team scripted the interviews with HIV-positive people in FB Chatbot, the Positive Coin participants then can chat with it, for further understanding and developing the AIDS identity, the coin users also symbolize the community members who possess viruses.

4. Appreciation and Depreciation
Positive Coin has an in-time exchange rate with the New Taiwan Dollar.

5. Handling Fee
The name of the handling fee is titled as the Antiviral Therapy medicines, such as Biktarvy, Triumeq, Odefsey.

6. Cultural Differences
To let participants know the geopolitical background on the spread of the disease, our team sets a Positive Coin ATM in MOCA. Participants can scan their digital wallet, and change their coin features at the ATM, and it will display an AIDS story from different cultures.

7. Auction
An art auction will be held at the end of the project, participants can purchase HIV-related artworks with their positive coins.

8. Money flow
In addition to the money gained by artists in the auction, the rest of it donates to Taiwan HIV NGOs, which creates additional income resources for the community.

#### What kind of impact-artistic, intellectual, communal, civic, social, etc.-do you hope your project will have? (100 words)

The covid
pubilic policy, the stigma of the disease and the LGBTQ

#### Who are the specific audiences/communities that you hope to engage with this project? Please think beyond the broad art community where possible. How are you hoping to reach them? (100 words)

Using the economic model and art to approach MIT communities.

#### What would be ideal venues for your work? Do you have existing relationships with or access to any of these venues? (100 words)

Wesiner gallery, sloan,

#### How might your proposed project act as a catalyst for your artistic and professional growth? In what ways is it a pivotal moment in your practice? (100 words)

It has been exprimented in 2018, these years in MIT, in touch with digitabl currency initiative, Sloan Bitcoin Club. Reinvention and enlarge the community who circulate the AIDS identity.

#### Given Creative Capital's comprehensive system of support, how would you envision our non-monetary services and resources helping you realize your goals for this project as well as those for your larger artistic and professional growth? (100 words)

> Wojnarowicz in Cambridge is a series of photographic portraits composed in response to David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York series, in which the artist was photographed wearing a mask of the transgressive French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Wojnarowicz in Cambridge brings queer visibility into the public sphere, inviting viewers to consider identity—as something constructed, as something fluid and changeable—so that the current dialogue (and debate) about identity politics becomes more nuanced, more inclusive, more representative. The photographic images in the Wojnarowicz in Cambridge series were taken using an iPhone and several disposable cameras. The artist Kevin McLellan documented five subjects—local men in Cambridge in their 30’s—at the following locations:
> pharmacies and a pharmaceutical company (to represent the proliferation and accessibility of effective HIV drugs that were not available during David’s lifetime due, in large part, to the stigma and homophobic politics surrounding what was often referred to as “the gay disease”)
a hospital (symbolizing life and death)
a rainbow-colored gay bench (to represent progress—in this case, the location of the first legally wed same-sex couple in the United States)
brutalist architecture (Gund Hall at Harvard University, a minimalist construction that showcases the bare building materials analogous to what this brutal pandemic has done to bodies)
in front of graffiti (to honor David’s relationship with public art)

## MIT Community Engagement:
> Engagement of the MIT community is an important aspect of all CAMIT grant-funded projects. Examples include:
• A performance, panel discussion, work-in-progress talk, or other sort of presentation of your project

• Workshops for MIT students and community members

• An on-campus exhibition 

• Engagement through MIT student organizations

• Documentation of the project through a website, publication, and/or social media which is shared with the MIT community through a specific outreach and communications plan


Events or programs that connect the MIT community with local Cambridge/Boston communities

## Please tell us about the skills and experience you have which will enable you to complete this project:
> These can be academic, self-taught, learned from the internet, or any other means of education and learning.

self-taught

## Proposed start and end date(s) of the project
> The exhibition, performance, or other project phase being proposed for grant funding may begin no earlier than November 18. Your project plan should take 6 months to 1 year to complete. You must be an MIT student/employee throughout the project process.

Dec 16 - May 16

## Proposed location(s) of the project:
> Please note that on-campus performance and exhibition spaces are in high demand; we recommend booking space as early as possible. In light of COVID-19, your project location should be viable under current, improving, or worsening public health conditions.

Martin Luther Center
Medical Center
LGBTQ Lounge
Weisner Gallery

## Approximate amount of funding you intend to apply for:
> Requests of up to $7,500 will be considered, but please note that grants at the highest funding levels are awarded only in very rare circumstances. If invited to submit a full proposal, your final funding request must not differ by more than 10% from your anticipated funding request in this proposal form.

$7500

## Anticipated categories of expenses:
> Please specify the categories of expenses you anticipate (i.e. materials, professional fees, equipment rentals, etc.). You may include dollar amount estimates for each category, if available

materials (woodwork, servers) - 1000
professional fees (two engineers, one adminstrative assistant) - 6000
equipment rentals (monitor, mini mac)- 500