COMMENTS: Declaration of Love / Campaign of Hate examines the positive and negative discourse that is abundant in online comment sections on social media platforms. This projectexplores social media, particularly the attention economy, and its emotive binary nature. To participate in the attention economy is to get attentionfrom the anonymous masses by love or hate.

The social media spaces we inhabitare neo-liberal by nature as everything absorbed into social media platforms can be turned into capital. I explore this through the creative process of the making of these art works. I first accumulate the online comments through purchasing them off people for one yuan. I then appropriate theonline comments and recontextualize them in the form of text drawings, which are then sold for a much higher price as art objects. Some may say that I take trash culture and recontextualize it into high culture.

The purpose of this project is allowing the audience to engage with the ubiquitous online content they consume everyday through a critical lens and acknowledge how daily life has become commodified due to the nature of the attention economy and the structures of social media. By re-contextualizing the digital text into material form, this allows the text to acquire a human expression through mark-making.

This exhibition is part of my ongoing interest in creative works that explore the physical manifestation of the virtual world (the Internet). These drawings materialise social media comments using traditional basic analogue art materials like paper, pencil, pen, crayons, in order to represent the virtual human experience. This work is the beginning of a larger ongoing art project in which I will continue to buy online comments off people from other countries, with different languages, that will collectively form an international textual work that explores the global virtual human experience.

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