aesthetics
How can we truly speak of blockchain-native aesthetics?
The existence of a native web3 aestheticFor a moment, the promise of a new cultural formation derived from a distinctive visual and symbolic vocabulary native to blockchain technologies, cryptographic economies and digital subjectivities seemed possible and desirable. But can we truly speak of blockchain-native aesthetics? Can such aesthetics be meaningfully integrated into the history of art, media theory, or social formation? We propose the term "web3 aesthetics” to interrogate and articulate a theory of art that would operate specifically on NFT markets and link it to the current discussions on digital art.
We understand aesthetics not as “decoration,” nor as that which is simply “beautiful,” but as the systematic production and critical analysis of sensation, value, and cultural consensus, as well as the study of the mediums that constitute the narratives and discourses attached to our understanding of the world. The object of aesthetics is used to precede—and even condition—the structural and infrastructural dimensions of a given framework, recursively shaping them and thereby enabling their evolution, in this case, the market dynamics that configure web3 not just as a financial instrument, but as a new social topology for art: one in which speculation, memetic culture, protocol design, and alternative forms of patronage operate as curatorial forces in themselves.
In attempting to construct an artistic and aesthetic discourse oriented toward such systems—one that remains legible within economic logics while responding to the sociological conditions through which aesthetics are stabilized—we must ask: are these regimes of organization and exchange the ground from which an aesthetic emerges, or have they become its ultimate horizon?
The aim of this article is not only to question the foundations of an allegedly existing theory––that of a web3 aesthetics––, but also to articulate the limits, requirements, and potentialities of aesthetics that are genuinely committed to coherent and effective modes of production, particularly as it pertains to artistic production as a concrete regime. Here, by effective, we refer to the capacity of an aesthetic analysis to operate critically within the conditions of its own production.
An effective analysis of artistic production must therefore approach art as a situated practice: an action embedded in specific technical, economic, institutional, logical and cultural contexts, and one that generates both qualitative and quantitative effects within those contexts. Art does not simply appear and stays fixed as an object; it intervenes, circulates, accumulates value, and produces consequences that exceed the immediate experience of form. In other words: art is always in-formation.
From this perspective, the question of “web3 aesthetics” cannot be posed independently of the technical infrastructures that sustain it. The emergence of “web3 aesthetics” would require more than the adoption of blockchain-based tools or decentralized modes of distribution. It would demand a set of shared conditions capable of stabilizing new forms of aesthetic exploration, as well as new logics for approaching art within these new frameworks, such as a re-imagination of the possibilities of the mediums involved in the display and production of a new form of art.
This raises a series of prior questions: what are the necessary preconditions for an aesthetic to be considered native to web3? Are these technical, such as programmability and immutability, or social, such as new forms of collective organization and governance? Or are they primarily economic, emerging from novel regimes of distribution, ownership, scarcity, and exchange? Without clarity on these conditions, the invocation of a web3 aesthetic risks remaining purely rhetorical.
About digital art
About digital art
We are undoubtedly in a moment of crisis that extends across all dimensions of the art market. For this reason, we observe that certain communities have begun to use—and in their own ways, to de-signify—the term “digital art” to refer abstractly to crypto-art markets, establishing a fallacious ambiguity. Our aim is to question the direct existence of this equivalence, usually misunderstood as a necessity.
In recent months, the term has circulated with increasing frequency, yet almost always in an affective register; "digital art" is often deployed expansively, without clear delimitations, criteria, or evaluative frameworks, as if the mere association with digital tools were sufficient to constitute an artistic category enough coherent with its market conditions and general context.
We ask, then, to what extent––and how––can we reconcile digital art with the logics of an emergent, and yet apparently collapsed, market context? Should we understand the market as a medium? In what sense can we talk about the relationship between these market-driven aesthetics and the digital art without falling into a kind of de-signifying abstraction? And then, most importantly, what do we mean by “digital art”?
In many cases, this abstractions are anchored to a specific market context, most notably blockchain-based marketplaces, as if participation in a specific market were enough to define both the ontological status of the artwork and the nature of its aesthetic identity. Such reasoning implicitly treats the market as a classificatory authority, capable of producing artistic and aesthetic categories through mechanisms of distribution and exchange alone.
This assumption warrants careful scrutiny. What, precisely, do we mean when we refer to “digital art”? A rigorous delimitation of the term is necessary to avoid it becoming an empty signifier capable of absorbing any practice that happens to circulate within digital environments.
Drawing on Christiane Paul as a key reference point, we stress that “digital art” has never admitted a stable or closed definition. Instead, it remains anchored in a specific historiography, one in which the computer art experiments of the 1960s and the new media practices of the late twentieth century serve as crucial precedents. Within this lineage, a recurring argument insists that digital art must be native to its medium: it cannot function merely as a classificatory label for cultural production that happens to make use of digital technologies, since the history of art is, in many respects, always already a history of technology.
For this reason, prevailing definitions of digital art tend to extend beyond the work’s formal appearance or technical substrate. They foreground its participatory dimensions, its processual character, and its dynamic modes of storage, execution, and distribution. Digital art is thus less an objectual endpoint than a mobile field of operations—dependent on situated temporalities, infrastructural conditions, and systemic logics rather than on fixed material presence.
From this perspective, works situated within blockchain environments may indeed qualify as digital art, but only insofar as their execution engages these broader conditions: the construction of systems, the procedural organization of form, and distribution logics consistent with the aesthetic demands of the digital. In short, not everything that is minted is necessarily digital art.
Our conclusion stems from an initial analysis of art as a field of action committed to the production of aesthetics through critical discourse that is situated––or anchored––in a context external to art itself, and then from the needs imposed by digital logics, which we would understand by defining the work not as a fixed object but as a moving, dynamic, in-formation set that implies participation, generativity, scalability, format dynamism, and, in general, a critical aesthetic oriented towards systems rather than fixed objects.
These are a some of works that we consider to follow the logics previously outlined.
We must be clear in our proposal: defining a native digital art that is also suitable for understanding it within the frameworks of web3 markets requires us to differentiate between the forms and aesthetics that spaces and markets can adopt under their logic and those interventions that start from these to constitute artistic proposals.
Digital art can neither be reduced to web3 art. Right now, at a time of general crisis in traditional markets, and in its inability to absorb new structures, NFT spaces have increasingly turned inward to adopt old models. A tension arises between an approach to blockchain as an art medium versus blockchain as a distribution model. Digital art—objectified—which was already part of the canon of traditional institutionalised art, seems unable to reconcile itself with art that appears as a product of NFT markets.
Traditional art market logics often constrain the production and reception of multimodal projects—works that unfold across multiple scales of representation, narration, and execution. Harold Cohen’s practice is exemplary in this regard: his computational works cannot be meaningfully understood apart from the generative system and production model that sustains them. To encounter the drawings produced by AARON as isolated objects would be to miss the work entirely, since the artistic operation is not located in any single output, but in the broader procedural body of the project. What matters, in other words, is not the object as such, but the system through which it is continuously instantiated.
In order to achieve a more defined statement, we invoke Sean Cubitt: “The work of digital aesthetics is to place us in the unthinkable zone of the non-human––to abandon mimetic realism, because it can only be an account of human perception––and, instead, to force a way of perceiving otherwise than humanly.” This quote is, for us, essential to defining a native digital art that differs from the cultural logics produced by the very markets we are dealing with here, which have led to the emergence and collapse of art forms that, although presented critically, due to their necessary dependence on traditional humanism and their absolute confinement to specific niches, have not managed to establish sufficiently considerable and radical temporalities and effectiveness, leading to the decline of the market and emerging cultural spaces.
Beyond Fixed Objects: System Oriented Art
As we’ve said previously, it is important to understand digital art within this specific market logic as a dynamic process or, as we’ve seen, always in-formation. Digital art cannot be based on objects but rather on systems. This does not imply that there cannot be objects, but rather that their formal, material, and aesthetic presentation cannot be separated from their context of production and distribution. We thus locate the work not in the object but in the system, leaving the object as a link in the connections that determine and enable navigation, processuality and dynamic mobility in a system that cannot be closed and encompassed solely as a storable and distributable unit.
There is, for us, a key condition in how art, media and markets have changed in recent decades. Other Internet and Caroline Busta —based on the work on "neural media" by K Allado-Ccdowell — talk a lot about this: previously, cultural products had a clear source and a linear relationship was established, building a clear and fixed understanding of the product or media. However, network-based distribution completely breaks this model, generating decentralised nodes of discourse legitimisation.
Mat Dryhurst has a similar approach when he describes protocol art as “art upstream the production of media”. These ideas are built upon the understanding of new dimensions, scales, temporalities, modes of representation and production. This means that what is consumed is not a product, that is, it is not a fixed object, an output that has been extracted mechanically from a linear and simple media system, but rather the diverse, simultaneous and scalable layers of fragments of discourse and the very protocols that establish the dynamics and fluxes of information. In order to establish a properly located contemporary art, the art of our time must take into account the specific dynamism that rules over distribution models, that is, the trend towards the system as well as the accelerated degradation of the object.
The critical question is not whether upstream market logics influence aesthetics—this has always been the case—but whether these logics are sufficient to constitute a specific and native aesthetic regime, and how not only artists but institutions can adopt a language where this perspective works. Can a market, even one as technically novel as web3, produce a set of visual and symbolic conventions whose coherence depends entirely on their function within circuits of exchange?
If aesthetics are understood as regimes of perception capable of sustaining meaning beyond immediate utility, then the limits of market-driven aesthetics become apparent. Market logics privilege exchangeability over singularity and visibility over reflection. Under such conditions, aesthetic forms tend to stabilize only insofar as they remain compatible with liquidity and attention economies. These are the forms that we must take into account when we are to define a truly operative and native “market as a medium” aesthetic. That is to say, if it can also sustain critical distance, internal differentiation, or formal necessity––which are, in our opinion, the necessary conditions of an art compromised with contemporarity.
The market as a medium
NFT art and crypto-native art markets have often been framed as an “independent” ecosystem: a parallel economy structured less around the traditional Western art world and more around emergent collective tendencies, online communities, and infrastructural forms of belonging. Rather than extending the already known logics, these markets have been shaped by distributed publics whose cultural references, aesthetics expectations, and modes of circulation don’t always align with the canon of contemporary art. How can these two spheres be realigned then?
Proposing a web3 aesthetic raises several problems: on the one hand, aesthetics understood as a cultural identity order generates a series of dynamics where market logic prevails, that is, token logics, regardless of the coherence of its forms or how they are conceptually integrated into market dynamics. On the other hand, and the one that concerns us most in this article, is the ability of these aesthetics to reconcile themselves with a truly critical discursive production, one that has the capacity to extend beyond the boundaries of the market that has generated them, thus allowing one of the most important needs of art to be effectively realised: to extend the “field”, to produce new aesthetic forms, thus re-signifying the tools of culture and knowledge.
It is true that markets do not simply distribute artworks, or, in other words, that the economic factor within these digital frameworks is not to be taken lightly; they structure visibility, temporalities of attention, regimes of value, and criteria of relevance. Within web3, market mechanisms—tokenization, liquidity, speculation, algorithmic ranking—operate as mediating forces that actively shape how artistic practices are produced, perceived, and evaluated.
However, recognizing the market as a medium does not resolve the central problem; it intensifies it. While the production of a web3 aesthetic would require these logics, the NFT markets, in their attempt to supplant the traditional art markets, abandon digital aesthetics in order to re-understand the collectible as an object. If art needs localised coherence and a strong link to its context, this break with the needs of supposed digital art in a digitally native market increases tension and undermines art's potential to constitute and produce the necessary abstractions and levels of criticism that allow it to explore the possibilities of contemporary and novel aesthetics.
We must then differentiate between an emerging market system that has its own logic (for example, one could mint a painting) and art that is native to this logic. They are two different things; just as one can produce a work and exhibit it in a gallery, one can also produce a work that uses the gallery as its medium, for example Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, from 1964.
The unresolved tension
Our proposal is to understand contemporary––and digital––art, which usually defines economic forms, recursively as something that, out of material necessity, must use these very forms as means for its critical and discursive production. What remains may be less an autonomous artistic language than a temporary alignment of forms optimized for exchange and distribution. In this scenario, the web3 market functions as a substrate from which art emerges as well as a necessary medium in an aesthetic and artistic production that must remain contemporary.
The unresolved tension, then, lies here: whether an aesthetic mediated primarily by market structures can exceed those structures, or whether it remains bound to them as a surface effect. To pose this question is not to deny the possibility of artistic practice within web3, but to insist that any claim to a native aesthetic must demonstrate its capacity to operate critically beyond the technical logics that condition its circulation, that is to be open to contingencies, to be able to be exteriorized, deterritorialized and reterritorialized, to be able to produce new discourses, new ways of understanding and sense-making. Without this excess—this capacity to produce meaning that is not exhausted by its medium—the idea of a web3 aesthetic risks collapsing back into a non-critical description of market behavior rather than a theory of art.
collective and the Institute of Network Cultures. He is currently part of the SYBIL ARC2 residency in Berlin.
Ian’s works and research focuses on language and its relation with material and/or political processes, value production, tokenization processes and objectification, immersed in a
context of visual break and intrinsic hyperconnectivity, understanding language and markets as mediums in his production.
He has been part of various releases on-chain, the latest, his genesis release on ETH with Fakewhale with his d/wb project.
Her curatorial work explores how emerging media, particularly artificial intelligence and algorithmic processes, reconfigure modes of perception, authorship, and representation.
Elena collaborates regularly with institutions, artists, and researchers to foster cross-disciplinary dialogues around computation, posthuman imaginaries, and the future of artistic production.
On Digital Frameworks
Technical Logic For A Body That Remembers
Working at the intersection of media theory, computational aesthetics, and speculative design, this exchange unfolds as a series of propositions about the technical logic that governs boundary conditions in digital culture.
The conversation emerges from 邊界_systems’ ongoing research into processes of artificialisation and the recursive structures that characterize contemporary technical systems. Through alternating voices that build on and complicate each other's propositions, Margo and Montserrat develop a vocabulary for understanding how computational apparatuses modify substances, produce intersections across different framing systems, and generate new economies not based on format as fixed value.
If it looks like AI, it is AI
IM-EX
The goal of implicit-explicit is to mutate a text-based body in order to increase its stable & dimensional complexity using content inputs &/or modifications. It can be played via solo exploration or within a competitive multiplayer context.
This body is mutated through navigation and movement that emerges from the central possibility of destabilising and re-stabilising the parameters and positions of its content.
This game emerges as a project within Sybil's residency, where, for six months, the 邊界 team will be working on developing the project with the help of collaborators.
During this time, the 邊界 team is committed to producing an extensive series of parallel materials related to this project, which will include both research practices and new publication formats, as well as artistic side projects working with different materials, physical events and more.
D/WB
S02
邊界_systems arises with the intention of unsettling institutional stasis and the geography of fields of action and knowledge, directly probing the structures that constitute cultural apparatuses and seeking to displace and reimagine possible formal configurations that may open onto new modalities of research and artistic production. Format s02 emerges centered on these practices, seeking to reconceptualize and reconcile the operative possibilities—both aesthetic and theoretical—within the conditions of digital culture, situating its inquiry at the limit, the edge, the frame, the frontier / from the philosophy of language, memory, the geometric and the abstract, the systems and the activable, and the processes of producing value, meaning, and identity.