COMMENTS - Declaration of Love / Campaign of Hate: Materialising Chinese online comments in the form of analogue drawings to explore the commodification of division on social media platforms.

This paper examines the creative process, research methodology and outcome of a participatory arts-based research project that engages with the often binary nature of social media comment sections and how these online social spaces are commodified. Participation in the attention economy is primarily done in two ways: one way is to win over the anonymous masses; the second is to enrage them. Both strategies get the attention of the masses who are then commodified into social capital and transferred into financial capital. Entitled COMMENTS: Declaration of Love/Campaign of Hate, the exhibition comprised of collected data in the form of (intangible) negative and positive online comments and materialised them into (tangible) text drawings which were accompanied by mixed media portraits. This art work was exhibited at the Chinese European Arts Centre in Xiamen, China and was the result of the participation of the local arts community and primarily the students from the Institute of Creativity and Innovation, a collaboration between the University for the Creative Arts (U.K) and Xiamen University (China). This project enabled the participants to engage with the ubiquitous online content that 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 while also being a continuous exploration of the notion of (digital) mark-making.