biānjiè.systems



Ian Margo






is a digital artist & researcher focused on the intersection between language, technology and economy. He works with a wide range of media (video, software, interface, experimental essay, generative AI, 3D, blockchain, datamoshing, performance, interactive installation, among others). He is co-founder of 邊界, as a researcher, he has published in DIFFRACTION 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.


How can we truly speak of blockchain-native aesthetics?
For 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. 

Technical Logic For A Body That Remembers
This conversation is written as a technical meditation on boundaries, frames, and the computational conditions that structure contemporary experience. What follows is a collaborative investigation into the edge. A dialogue between Ian Margo and Alexandre Montserrat of 邊界_systems that explores how digital systems produce new forms of memory, attention, and value.

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.
On Digital FrameworksThe sign would thus be what is given as activatable in a process of abstraction. The system, which does not remain static, is subject to the contingency of the instability produced by the signs that configure it. The system, then, constantly depends on transformations and translations, since its sets of data may be re-signified through processes of abstraction. We would say that any distribution of value is potentially also the production of value through new levels of abstraction. This can be observed in any temporality we apply to any technology.




邊界 Team
ian margoalexandre montserrat


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