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.