Digital Tattoo

Every comment published becomes a digital tattoo

when public shaming became digital.

In history, public judging/shaming has always been a common method to keep justice. 

With the rising of the internet and social media, the methods of public shaming have been significantly amplified

And there are a lot of people who are shamed online who have not necessarily committed any law-breaking crime or social transgression. 

Reputation damaging comments online is searchable, seeable they are like tattoos on the people’s body and are projected to the whole world. 

QiangZi was really famous during the 2000s for creating “suck” tattoos, and people expanded his tattoos into jokes on the internet.

All the insults and shaming made him famous and he had been doxxed. He received hundreds of harassment and even threatening phone calls, but tattooing is a totally legal activity.  One person provides a service, and customers feel that the service is worthy of the price and meets their expectations and they make a deal. It’s reasonable, not harmful at all.

People shamed him for all kinds of reasons including bad tattoo skills, bad design, bad photo, and strange haircut.  Maybe all of these reasons were people just trying to prove they have better taste.  Nevertheless, it was digital bullying.

In 2017, I had the chance to visit QiangZi in person and talked with him about all of the digital shaming he had experienced. 

He ran a photo booth near an amusement park almost 20 years ago, and that’s when he started tattooing.  He was always interested in art, and his customers had a good relationship with him.  They encouraged him to start doing tattooing.  He taught himself and practiced on friends.  Then he took photos in his photo booth and he never imagined how these photos leaked onto the internet would make him famous.

The shaming he experienced on the internet kind of killed his passion for art.  He changed his business to running a mobile canteen on an abandoned bus, but a lot of the people who came to his canteen just wanted to meet him and took photos with him to post online. Eventually, he ended up doing a delivery job.

I did tattoos for people before, and I have a lot of tattoos on me.  All random improvised ones, pretty bad skills. 

For a long time, I was struggling with those comments on the internet by strangers about my meaningless, irresponsible tattoos. 

So i made this project, an interactive photo, showing all the negative comments i ever had about my tattoos.  When people click on the comments which represent the comments being seen online, it turns into a tattoo on my body, which i call a digital tattoo.