2024 7-segment display, ir sensor, stereo speaker, “Taiwan Personal Insult Fine Chart” Meme
Quantification of Compensable Emotion is a sound installation utilizing electronic circuitry with an infrared sensor triggering two outputs: a speaker playback and a numerical display. The motion sensor activates an audio recording of the Taiwanese swear word 「幹你娘」 (“motherf-ker”) and increments the display by $2,666 USD-the highest fine ever imposed for using the phrase under Taiwan’s Civil Code Article 195. This work explores the commodification of emotion and language within legal systems, seek to examine the interplay and excess that emerge between social expression and ethical value within institutional frameworks.
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By materializing the “Taiwan Personal Insult Fine Chart” Meme, what originally exists in digital spaces, the printed score legitimizes itself as a visualized score, juxtaposed with the installation’s electronic components. This disconnection highlights the abstraction and excess inherent in a monetary system operating within cultural and linguistic frameworks.
As Max Haiven notes in Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization:
“Contemporary art is economically valuable as both ‘contemporary’ and as ‘art,’ and can therefore be financialized, precisely because it somehow retains and manifests its own refusal of capitalism’s axiom of value” (Haiven, 4).
This work seeks to engage with the dynamics of culture within state apparatuses and legal systems, presenting an abstraction of financialization within an artistic context.
By recontextualizing a digital meme into a physical and artistic form, the work not only critiques the commodification of language but also invites viewers to question the legitimacy of the whole act. This act of translation—from meme to installation—highlights the underlying tensions between intangible social phenomena and the tangible systems that regulate and monetize them, positioning art as a critical medium for examining and challenging these dynamics.
“Matters of Concern”
Bruno Latour opens his essay Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? by reflecting on the endless “wars” waged in cultural, scientific, and social spheres, questioning whether scholars and intellectuals should perpetuate this cycle of destruction. He critiques academia’s fixation on outdated targets, likening scholars to mechanical toys repeating actions in a changed world. Latour calls for a shift from deconstruction to a focus on “matters of concern,” urging academics to confront emerging threats with innovative approaches.
Quantification of Compensable Emotion resonates with Latour’s call by repurposing surveillance technology to critique the very state apparatus that birthed it. The work transforms a tool of control into a platform for interrogating power structures, exemplifying Latour’s vision of moving beyond critique. It addresses “matters of concern” by examining the legal systems that assign monetary value to emotional expressions, challenging the commodification and regulation of human experience.