@dearhaters (2018)

subculture research; book-publication + video installation

After #dearcatcallers went viral, I was fascinated by the interaction people had with the account.
Around 20.000 comments were collected, and the language people wrote in was, so to say, peculiar.
Around 75% were hate-comments, towards both sides.
Some people let themselves go free and expressed themselves in tens of comments, some even hundreds.

What drove their anger and their need to share it?

I researched the activity on the account itself and constructed this in a book-series.
The books contain the full comments section per post with a compact data-analyses.
Hate-comments and hate-commenters are highlighted, interviewed and their data is visualised in various ways.

The covers contain the word that is used most frequent in each comments section of that particular post.
It was a way to explore how the different posts triggered different atmospheres.
Examples from the variety of most used words are; ‘men’, ‘woman’, ‘beautiful’, ‘you’, ‘don’t’, ‘smile’, ‘creepy’, ‘like’

video-installation

Together with a selfdefined internet-hater I went to the park.
It became an intimate conversation about his motives, self-defense-mechanisms and emotion-control.


The video was displayed in a three-dimensional installation; merging the internethater and his comments.
He is okay with his face being published in the video, he wants his (real+virtual) name to stay unknown.