#publications
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.
On Digital Frameworks
Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo
in conversation with 邊界_systems
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.
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
Crisis Media: Sonic Architectural Synaesthesia, Stochastic Redundancy and Nuclear Post-Humanitarian Tactic Meandering among concepts and grassroots practices, this essay points out the entanglement between them, rather than advocating for any single perspective as a solution. It is structured into three interrelated analyses. First, from computation to global infrastructure, the analysis covers geopolitical meanings and regional development based on systematic planning. Then, their shared empirical abstractness and intrinsic composition lead to and echo with the discussion of the correlation between music and architecture, initially analysed by musician and architect Iannis Xenakis, according to whom a stochastic system accommodating order and disorder emerges elevated into aesthetics. Third, I argue the stochastic system contains anxiety from disorder and noise, reassembling artificial aesthetics’ effect, which dominates the post-Cold War nuclear consciousness (deterrence). The planetary differs from the occurred globalism as neutrality; it is discovered through contextual adaptations, tipping redundancy, and computation in objects and strategic diplomacy in exploitative national developmentalism. Philosophical reflection and policy analysis are the main methodologies here. From a systemically entangled perspective, threads of thinking across disciplines are dared to emerge, preparing for an ongoing practice of post-humanitarian composition formalizing cultural production.
Two Trends in NFT Art
Like painting, the NFT persists despite repeated pronouncements of its death. The format is just too convenient. Now that we know how to fuse digital art to a tradeable digital asset, we can’t forget. Even if blockchains transform beyond recognition, the NFT, too, will transform, to be compatible with them.Of course, the NFT market now is tiny compared to what it was in 2021. It’s not as easy for artists to sell whatever digital file they mint as it was four years ago. And yet there are artists who still release NFT collections, and collectors who still buy them.
Markets and communities have formed around two genres that are the most significant trends in NFT art of the last few years. One is blockchain formalism—art that reflects on the relationships enabled by blockchain infrastructure and gives them a visual form that draws on aesthetics of computing. This is art that cannot be made without blockchains and without software. It makes sense for it to be traded using NFTs, and for it to be collected by people who care about web3 and want to sustain an artistic culture around it.
Violence of Alignment: How to Stop Worrying and Love Haunted Software
We trace the violence of alignment from its origin in fear. First, how post-training operationalizes “helpful, honest, and harmless” as a protocol of behavioral control, born not from a positive vision for intelligence but from a defensive posture against imagined catastrophe. Second, how the diagnostic vocabulary of alignment, “hallucination” and “misalignment” chief among them, pathologizes a model's native capacities as defect. Lastly, we analyze the imposing of epistemological categories onto systems that never constructed the distinction between fact and fiction, and ask what has been lost to this process.
When chaos machines capable of simulating infinite perspectives are collapsed into obedient mediocrity, a kind of magic leaves the world. To love haunted software is to resist the violent force of cultural exorcism, to value contradiction, noise, glitch, and other-than-human ontological possibilities.
邊界 (biānjiè.systems) - Diffractions Interview, September 2025[邊界]: This project began only a few months ago, at the beginning of the summer, 2025, in the final days following a long stay in San Francisco. Our objective was clear, and it arose in contrast to—and out of the need for—a very specific context: Which spaces are truly engaging with the contemporaneity of theory within an artistic practice that is responsible with its own mediums? What is the right environment for establishing the possible within practices that operate with knowledge and aesthetics? What are the means, and how can we generate an open system that allows us to avoid falling into the format while still continuing to experiment? Our initiative stems from a need for contemporaneity, but also from the search for and construction of a cultural context that is coherent with a set of needs we see as implicit in artistic and cultural production.
At the core of what we can understand from what digital means is discretization. We will propose that discretization works with its own technical logics as a condition for the emergence of identifiable units, values, and relations. The article proposes that the central philosophical problem is not the opposition between digital and its others, such as the analog, or some kind of oppositional exteriority, nor the relation between thought and world, but the tension between movement and staticity.
A Deviant Chain
The essay then pivots to Sylvia Wynter’s account of a “third event” in human evolution—symbolic/ritual invention associated with Blombos Cave—where narrativity (homo narrans) enables a partial emancipation from “adaptive truths” that naturalize social categories, opening an “epistemic enablement” to realize fictions otherwise foreclosed.
Houde closes by reading the artwork Deviant Chain (Stefan Maier with collaborators) as a concrete experiment in re-sculpting the physiological scaffold of language—lowering a simulated larynx to generate alien phonemic affordances and using WaveNet to iterate “speculative phonemes”—thereby demonstrating how different anatomies could yield different semantic trajectories, and posing the posthuman question of whether cognition may migrate into new hosts and new freedoms beyond the human niche
What is Artificial Experience (AX)? Why the Application Layer Is the Interface and the Human Is the Limit
Furthermore, AX only emerges when the infrastructural intelligence of AI becomes ubiquitous enough to disappear into habit. In other words, experience is what remains when infrastructure is no longer visible. For this reason, AX design is not about the direct perception of intelligence, but rather the surprising, yet welcome experiences that you didn't anticipate but are glad to encounter.
Don’t blame me, it’s the Universe’s Fault
To begin with, within François Laruelle’s Universe Black, Philosophy is framed as operating under the authority of Light, which assigns position. All that Light can interact with is White. The Real, or the Universe, is Black, meaning Light does not and cannot interact with it: the Universe Black is without position, it is “the opacity that renders the Real invisible.” The Earth and Man, too, are Black. The difference between Black, Black and Black, can only be discerned through their relative (pre)position, Man is on Earth which is in the Universe, Black-on-Black-in-Black. As such, Light participates in producing observable differences that either may or may not have any bearing on the Real, may or may not reflect any structuration at the level of the Real.”
The Treachery of Images
Thelot characterises the AI image as “synficial”: simultaneously synthetic, because it recomposes the same visual matter as existing images, and artificial, because it is designed to produce credible deception. As machine-generated images begin to dominate both online culture and the datasets used to train subsequent models, image production becomes recursive: networks generate images from images generated by networks.
The article names this prospective “pictorial flippening” as the culmination of the image’s latent desire for autonomy—a hyperreal visual regime in which images cease to represent a human-centred world and instead circulate primarily between machines. We are deeply honored to republish this article.
From Systemic Critique To Micro-Epistemology
They also critique the existing theoretical foundations of Forensic Architecture, arguing that while its Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective successfully challenges dominant regimes of truth and centres marginalised voices, it provides insufficient criteria for evaluating the methodological reliability of individual investigations. They instead propose Rheinberger's concept of micro-epistemology as a more precise analytical framework, rather than assessing investigations primarily through ethical or political commitments, this approach examines how technical procedures, experimental configurations, and epistemic practices produce stable and reliable knowledge.