Positive Coin Project Intro

Contaminating Self-Ownership

The term "queer," which once represented radical difference and resistance, has increasingly been reappropriated by the neoliberal free market, producing new forms of exclusion through post-colonial spectatorship and the maintenance of identity legitimacy and visibility, thereby obscuring individual differences. The marginalized are often compelled to self-produce and adapt their identities to external norms in order to be legible within societal structures.

How can we perceive identity beyond the lens of self-owned commodities and toward the concept of the commons? Perhaps we need to shift from using a light microscope to an electron microscope to better see how humanity is interconnected. While Forkonomy() uses the fluidity of the South China Sea to question claims of sovereignty, Positive Coin, utilizes HIV, the AIDS virus, as a device to mock, contaminate, and commoning the neoliberal identities. As the virus spreads and infects among bodies, it penetrates the separation of skin-deep identity narratives. When disease is spread or “gifted” like a commons, it challenges the commodification and ownership of bodies and identities.

• Scanning electron micrograph of HIV-1 budding (in green) from cultured lymphocyte. Photo Credit: C. GoldsmithContent Providers: CDC/ C. Goldsmith, P. Feorino, E. L.

The Price of Stigma

• Positive Coin user’s interface. Image credit: Tzu Tung Lee

• Positive Coin digital wallet wrist. Image credit: C-Lab, Taipei

Positive Coin is a digital currency crafted to play with the perceptions surrounding AIDS identity. By referencing the term "positive," it indicates both an HIV diagnosis and how the HIV community is compelled to remain upbeat in a heteronormative, ableist society.

When first exhibited at Taipei C-Lab and MOCA in 2019, the coin featured designs inspired by HIV's biological characteristics, symbolizing different aspects of the virus. Participants could purchase Positive Coins online using traditional fiat currency. Upon purchase, they received one of four types of coins, each representing one of the four major HIV subtypes. These coins were randomly distributed to participants' digital wallets.
Mimicking HIV subtypes characteristics, the coin's features included varying interest rates and survival times. For example, the Type 1 Coin offered the highest interest rate and the longest survival time, mirroring HIV-1 Group M, which multiplies rapidly but is less fatal and requires less maintenance compared to other strains. Different coin types had varying handling fees and maintenance costs, reflecting the differing virulence and treatment complexities of HIV subtypes. The coins expired within 14 to 21 days unless participants revisited exchange centers located in C-Lab to clear a handling fee, simulating the ongoing management and attention required when living with HIV.

Moreover, it was also designed with interactive features that simulate viral mutation. When two participants scanned their wallets at an ATM located in MOCA, their Positive Coins interacted, randomly mixing interest rates and handling fees. The ATM screen showcased a story of how HIV may be transmitted in different cultures. This feature mimicked how HIV can mutate and combine into new strains, emphasizing the unpredictability of shared viral branches under various socio-political complexities.

• The phylogenetic tree of the SIV and HIV. Photo Credit: Thomas Splettstoesser (www.scistyle.com)

• The ATM installed in MOCA, Taipei. When two participants scan their digital wallets, their Positive Coins mix and mutate into a new branch. A story of how HIV may be transmitted in different cultures is then revealed on the screen. Photo credit: Lee Tzu Tung

The project also incorporated a price fluctuation mechanism based on current stigma levels associated with HIV/AIDS. The coin's price fluctuated accordingly: if stigma levels rose, the price of the Positive Coin increased, reducing the incentive for outsiders to purchase goods with it and symbolizing social exclusion. Conversely, when stigma levels decreased, the coin's price lowered, making it easier for those outside the community to engage, representing social acceptance. Higher stigma levels encouraged stronger bonds and cohesion among Positive Coin holders, reflecting marginalized communities' internal support networks.

At the project's conclusion, participants could use their accumulated Positive Coins to bid on HIV-related artworks and goods in an art auction. Proceeds from the auction were donated to non-governmental organizations focused on HIV, creating a full monetary circle. Positive Coin simulates HIV's growth, medical control, mutation, and the dynamics within the disease identity community, as letting Positive Coin holders experience a piece of HIV-positive person’s life.

• Positive Coin price page, the price on Jan 03, 2023 is 110,000 GWei.

Homo Carceralis in Pandemic Time

Positive Coin was invited to be exhibited in Beijing from November 2022 to March 2023, a period when the pandemic was at its peak and coincided with the PRC's 13th National People's Congress. Due to the restrictive political climate and increased censorship, the project could hardly connect with HIV-related NGOs and artists to create a monetary circle. As a result, the project focused on gathering audience responses through a questionnaire on their perceptions of HIV control. Though the questions centered around AIDS, they also provided insight into public sentiment regarding China’s COVID-19 policies. To circumvent the Chinese government's censorship of digital information, these audience responses were later minted as NFTs, ensuring their answers would be preserved and resistant to censorship.

Nick Bostrom's "Vulnerable World Hypothesis" calls for creating a "high-tech panopticon" consisting of global governance and continuous real-time surveillance of every living person on the planet. China's stringent "Zero Covid" policy reveals the hyper-realization of such a high-tech panopticon. Numerous tragedies resulting from strict lockdown measures. COVID-control workers have locked citizens' doors to prevent them from going outside. Students who began college in 2020 were confined to campus for almost two years. The "green" health code app is required everywhere in China; it identifies an individual's COVID-19 risk level as red, yellow, or green. There have been reports of authorities using the health code to restrict public gatherings or access to public services. In June 2022, over 1,300 depositors of bankrupt rural banks in Henan found their health codes turned red, preventing them from attending a protest in Zhengzhou.One protestor responded, "They are putting digital handcuffs on us. Many citizens are either accused of criminally interfering with pandemic prevention or of inciting subversion and provoking trouble. According to scholar Jackie Wang, it is a "carceral laboratory"—a zone where new control techniques are tested on society's "others." Every living, breathing person becomes a potential risk for "civilizational vulnerability" and a subject of suspicion. Social, health, and ethnic minorities have become objects of intense surveillance. China's prisons, police, and hospitals are used to displace and control COVID-positive people, Uyghurs, and protesters.
The situation is similar to the AIDS pandemic: in the name of public health measures, individual freedoms were restricted, surveillance increased, and stigma against certain identities was heightened, creating long-term socio-economic and mental health crises. Exhibiting this work under China's most fervent pandemic control reenacts the hyper-realization of such a high-tech panopticon.
Though the project is called Positive Coin, NFTs and blockchain technology were used beyond mere financial design; they serve to semi-permanently preserve the audience's information to avoid authoritarian interference. It signifies the control that led citizens to silence, and each coin now encapsulates the emotions fueled by state paranoia.

The Viral Gift Economy

• The bio-hazardous symbols that are often within the bug-chaser community.

As in China’s politics, control and surveillance mechanisms have infiltrated the individual body. Hospitals, schools, and policing systems—these architectures of disciplinary power—are electrified, miniaturized, and embedded in digital personal communication devices. The public health system extends the national surveillance plan. To maintain a "healthy," "clean," "productive," and "reproductive" state, biotechnological records and digital pharmaceutical transcriptions are used to enforce counteractions that diminish or ostracize deviants.

If the Positive Coin symbolizes the AIDS virus, the entire project is designed to let participants hold and chase AIDS. Despite many punitive notions of AIDS, some people also see HIV as a gift. "Bug chasers" are those who intentionally seek HIV infection, and some HIV-positive individuals purposely seek out others to infect — known as "gift-givers."

There are many reasons for chasing the bug; one is viewing it as a sexually and personally empowering act. While health policies promote safe sex and send threatening messages about how horrible AIDS is, many bug-chasers wish to overcome the sense of isolation resulting from "cold, sterile" protected sex and the fear that has long hindered their search for intimacy. Additionally, an HIV-positive status provides a shared identity and sense of community. It serves as a political device and action against social norms and heteronormativity, which include rigid conformity to safe and healthy sex practices. Though many treatments are available today, bug chasing can still be regarded as an active suicidal behavior that confronts one's fear of death with the fear of isolation.
Bug chasers exemplify the complex outcomes of health control and societal stigma. In AIDS and Its Metaphors, Susan Sontag describes how militaristic language frames disease narratives, depicting AIDS as an internal enemy and a punishment for sexual deviance. This dual narrative of punishment and internal disorder contributes to a sense of shame that is not easily addressed by society's "positive" discourse, while also reinforcing governmental control by justifying surveillance and intervention in the name of public health.

When surveillance, shame, and vulnerability are imposed by state paranoia, the neoliberal concepts of identity and self-ownership become illusions. Suddenly, the body is downgraded to a biological carrier of disease, prompting the state to exert its power to prevent its spread to the "human". Military narratives never aid in healing, yet the pandemic virus has then been transformed into a shared enemy within an illusory narrative. Its commoning features infiltrate individual boundaries and disrupt well-maintained identity governance.

Bug chasers can be seen as an outcome and an outcast of bodily panopticism; however, it can also be viewed inversely, where individuals actively embrace the virus to disrupt the government's attempts to control their bodies through fear, shame, and surveillance. They are creating a common economy—an inverted system of gift economy where gifters create interconnected experiences that infiltrate individual boundaries and traverse the dichotomies between human and non-human, pride and stigma, able-bodied and Crip.

Collaborative Fluid Sculpture for the Static Political Dilemma

• Most of my artworks are open-source and available on HackMD. (Photo credit: Lee Tzu-Tung)

Both Forkonomy() and Positive Coin exemplify how artistic and creative uses of technology can challenge entrenched economic illusions. The ease with which seawater transitions between gas, liquid, and solid states and travels between nations demonstrates how unquenchable, rigid ownership and capitalism desires chase after every form. Similarly, at the viral scale, neoliberal identities make no distinctions. The colonial government and its spectatorship tries to extend their boundary claims at the viral scale, yet none-of the physical bodies can be the sole owners of their microbes and unique diseases; our bodies and cells have already collaborated with non-humans as shared commons. In the blockchain realm, which is slightly beyond government's reach, humans and nonhumans—including animals— can all have an address to keep their voices and records intact when contracting and transacting from an address.

In addition to the above projects, most of my artwork is openly licensed under Creative Commons (CC-BY-4.0); all audiences and creators are free to use the design materials, duplicate the artwork, or continue the work with their own variations, just as with any kind of open-source software. As my ideas come from all parts of the world and are a connection with others, I use this method to challenge the idea of ownership between the artist and their artwork.
As a Taiwanese queer artist, I believe it is important to experiment with the current political and economic situation. Facing a neighboring totalitarian regime, the islanders naturally developed a nationalistic narrative for independence, while overly reliant on high-tech industries like TSMC and AI economic systems to support our democratic society. It becomes crucial to use creative methods to queer static nationalistic and economic imaginations – By doing so, artists create gaps between the layers of national pride and economic growth, sculpting multiple universes that can transcend daily political pressures and dilemmas.