Forking Sovereignty! Mutates Through Contagion! _ Part III

Published page on Curatography

5. 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.

Fig. 13 Health Code Interface in China, Source: Ryan McMorrow

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.

6. The Viral Gift Economy

Fig. 14: 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, this 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.

7. Collaborative Fluid Sculpture for the Static Political Dilemma

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 emphasizes fluidity, and travels between nations demonstrates how unquenchable, rigid ownership and capitalism desire chase after  every form. Similarly, at the viral scale, market identities make no separation. The colonial government and its spectatorship tries to extend their boundary claims at the viral scale, yet none-of the physical bodies fcan exercise its control as the sole owner of its microbes and unique diseases; our bodies and cells have already collaborated with non-humans as shared commons. In the blockchain realm, which isslightly beyond government’s reach, humans and nonhumans—including animals—canhave an address to keep their voices and records intact when contracting and transacting.

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 economic situation. Facing a neighboring totalitarian regime,  the islanders naturally developed a nationalistic narrative for independence, while overly reliant on the high-tech 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 createsgaps between the layers of national pride and economic growth, sculpting multiple universes that can transcend daily political pressures and dilemmas.

Fig. 15: Most of my artworks are open-source and available on HackMD. (Photo credit: Lee Tzu-Tung)

Appendix. Bibliotheque for the Series

1. Dhawan, Nikita, Antke Engel, Christoph H. E. Holzhey, and Volker Woltersdorff. Global Justice and desire: Queering economy. London: Routledge, 2016.

2. Foucault, Michel. The history of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

3. McRuer, Robert, and Michael Bérubé. Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

4. Mitropoulos, Angela. Contract and contagion: From Biopolitics to oikonomia. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2023.

5. Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. NY, NY: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2017.