blockchain-native
aesthetics

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ian margo elena carbajal 03.04.2026

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.

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On Digital Frameworks

The 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.learn more

Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo
in conversation with 邊界_systems

In this conversation for 邊界_systems, Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo discuss Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits as a thesis about capital grasped “from above”: not necessarily a new historical phase, but an ontological recognition of capital as an abstract operational object whose logic is not exhausted by any human-centered discourse.

The interview stress-tests exocapitalism across contemporary art, Web3, AI-agent “Coasean” coordination, and the fate of “the political,” while explicitly situating the authors’ claims amid a web of references and interlocutors: James C. Scott via a shout-out attributed to Blaise Agüera y Arcas ; decentralization skepticism credited to Benjamin Bratton; and a direct engagement with Seb Krier’s agentic bargaining optimism. In the art register, they note how artists and theorists quickly “grasp the fold,” naming Hito Steyerl, Simon Denny, Mark Leckey, and Mohammad Salemy as adjacent nodes, while also drawing on McKenzie Wark, Catherine Malabou, and Beatrice Fazi for orientation on vectorialization, anarchism, and computation-as-thought; they even cite Nick Land’s reaction in the broader discourse ecosystem.learn more

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.learn more

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Dynamism is information achieved through the constant incorporation of a pre-individual state as affect

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implicit-explicit2025SHANGHAI

IM-EX2026BERLIN

implicit-explicit is an interface-driven, multimodal game exploring questions around digital frameworks, embodiment, language, navigation, the emergence of computational bodies and information as a constant-evolving process. It question the status of gaming itself through an experimental process that unifies research with production and tries to avoid the material constraints of the common cultural understandings around gaming and digital frameworks.

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. These modifications and activations of linguistic content allow one to navigate a sort of labyrinth of interfaces, open ‘doors’ and accumulate layers of representativeness, following a specific set of parameters and operating from questions that delve into the possibility of an effectively operational content within the digital framework.

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.learn more

D/WB2025

The d/wb (desert/wet box) project, developed over a year across Madrid, London, and San Francisco, CA, constitutes a sustained inquiry into the entangled domains of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, semiotics, and technological mediation. Composed of three interrelated works — the wet box, third extension, and fieldware —, it functions as an experimental probe into the processes by which signs are produced, abstracted, and ultimately activated as vectors of value.
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S02STATEMENT

From within 邊界_systems, we interrogate the limitations and potentials that the digital framework offers for operating the format from an extensive perspective—that is, operating from the framework with the framework, from the limit with the limit, from the edge with the edge. We approach the format in the digital context not as a fixed entity but as a malleable cultural instrument, enabling geometric multiplicities and the production of emergent fields.

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.
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IMPLICIT-EXPLICIT2025SHANGHAI

邊界 Team
ian margoalexandre montserrat

biānjiè.systems