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 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's 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.
Originally published at Rendah Magazine
Technical Logic For A Body That Remembers
[Ian Margo]
The Boundary: We are interested in it (boundary, border, frontier, limit, edge, frame) – 邊界 / boundary – since it is our intention to work as close to it as possible; close to the horizon of the instant, sliding along its blade / it cannot be crossed. The edge frames a singularity, an instantaneous and immediate tension. It contains all its potential; it produces and is produced by a background that annihilates it. Nothing remains static beyond the edge.
[Alexandre Montserrat]
We insist. To recognise fidelity is to watch the edge work. Overreach the frame and the figure dissolves back into field; sanitise the field and nothing interesting occurs. Two modalities of retention refuse synthesis. (A system couples before it individuates.) O₀, as vast, indifferent sediment; O₁, as the cut that learns to lose. Form is the local contour of practice. Format is the itinerary of its return.
Compose the halt and now, resume.
[Ian Margo]
The edge, the frame, the screen set out a series of planes through which what emerges flows: the possible that is released, that becomes possible. The edge permeates, collapses its static form when reconciled with time, when mediated. In interaction with the edge, the abstract appears, and what permeates from it detaches and is produced. A sign, a token, a meaning emerges in relation to the background, a specific value, a content within the message.
[Alexandre Montserrat]
The edge is not a line. The edge is a timing device.
The edge frames a singular instant where potentials condense without settling; it is participatory, resonant, and scalar. Nothing holds still at the boundary: what appears is a gyre of affordances that threaten to homogenise yet remain divergent.
[Ian Margo]
The Message: implies a certain directionality. We are interested in the frame of the message. It makes the map possible, it carries out a cartographic investigation. Content is the decadent byproduct of the production of a new frame. It is not operative on its own. Once activated, content is modified (an activation is a modification of substances). An activation is required.
[Alexandre Montserrat]
There is no passage without a mediator. A frame can assemble without subjugating. Subjects do not ground the system. Discrete orders refuse to resemble themselves, entering into becomings that exceed their own parameters.
[Ian Margo]
Activation: we are interested in the medium itself. We operate from the computational frame to the field. In the field, indifference takes place. We are interested in the digital field for its representative capacity. Representation allows geometric activation (it is not applicable to the external field (we cannot know how many external fields there are (if the field behaves similarly outside the edge (outside the edge there would be pure movement (movement is incompatible with the stillness of geometry (geometry is activated within a system of calculation (a system of calculation is a linguistic system (a linguistic system will activate this or that value)))))))).
[Alexandre Montserrat]
Representation must be weak enough to turn, to allow asynchronous redescription without foreclosure; otherwise protocol hardens into dogma and spontaneity is constrained. The field is indifferent; the framed encounter is not. It has been made apparent. The intimate operates at every level.
[Ian Margo]
Activation: geometry does not underlie. Information cannot be given. What is given requires a point of departure, a geometric axis. We are interested in the digital field and its geometric capacity. Directionality may turn, representation must be weak, interaction begins with a minimum of two orders of magnitude, repetition presents itself (in the medium (immediate) in transfer. To transfer is to activate. An activation requires the production of a mediator. The mediator is not given, it is produced.
[Alexandre Montserrat]
Did attention get sharpened without brutality? Did options increase without overload? Did the rhythm protect thought where it needed protecting? Halt to temper. Resume to test “form”. Keep the boundary mobile. Living systems learn by degrading. Without loss there is only storage; with loss there is memory.
[Ian Margo]
Play: arises from collectivizing the experience of the possible. We are interested in the field and the desert. To build the space where the possible may slide and enfold. The edge is a horizontal space that conjures abstractions through interactions. Discourse appears at the edge through opposition that understands the collapse of its opposites in a singular dance. Nothing in the opposites is exempt from the frame and the directionality of their opposition, nor from their opposite, which does not exist as a thing in itself.
[Alexandre Montserrat]
In the desert, horizons detach and show their own grammar. The work oscillates scene-to-scene; what cannot survive the desert is not allowed to sediment in the wet.
[Ian Margo]
Opposition is an activation. Intersection is the production of discourse. Direction is production of value. The frontier does not remain static.
The materials are given since the language model is limited upon a background it cannot access. This layer operates upon the background. What returns from the activation does so again framed as input: Value has been modified. It is enough to look at it.
[Alexandre Montserrat]
Model outputs enter platforms, get indexed, and re-enter future training. This is bleed. Temporal affordances that allow the next form to appear. To bleed names the moment when a format, once activated, exceeds its boundary and re-enters the system as fresh inputs. It selects, frames, and crosses formats so that heterogeneous schemas can intersect and generate surplus value. Looking is already an operation: an activation is a modification of substances. Bleed upstream and the protocol learns what it has been doing. Bleed downstream and the artifact learns how to let go.
First, a formatting. A passage from continuous phenomena to discrete substrates. Sound is sampled; images rasterised; videos chunked in space-time and texts normalised. Sampling rates, bit-depths, colour spaces, codecs and metadata define a regime where certain differences are salient and others collapse. This is the first order (O₀): pre-individual retention traces without knowledge. It is not “neutral”. A regime of relation that demarcates the sensible. All are artificialisations: they make materials manipulable by forcing them through lattices where geometry (and therefore editing) is possible.
[Ian Margo]
To look at it: discourse production is a curatorial process that works by activating content and producing intersections across different framing systems. One operates with form, produces and reproduces format. From the border we are interested in breaking format by activating it. Activating the format requires a minimum of crossed formats. The boundary is capable of producing new economies not based on format as a necessary value. From the frame we are interested in format as a mobile matter. Format may be mobile in certain fields. Play is the basis of format’s operativity. Play arises from collectivizing the experience of the possible.
[Alexandre Montserrat]
Value is what a frame can repeatedly activate under changing contingencies. Curatorship is a calculus of directionality: who is shown what, when, and with what salience. It is then a differential geometry of frames: we tune curvature (constraints), torsion (cross-format coupling), and length (exposure) to stabilise a figure without killing its capacity to move.
[Ian Margo]
The digital hyper-economy is a computational apparatus that scales, or a system of modification of substances designed to assimilate and reproduce the orders of magnitude and cartographies of content. Recursive artifact, the only way to return upon itself is by assimilating what will be activated. What is assimilated is the logic of the technical, of the artifact. Assimilation delineates a certain parcel and defines embodiment. Embodiment does not require a physical body as we would understand it (a tool can not be used).
[Alexandre Montserrat]
Media become tokens; model outputs become media again. What we choose to discretise (and how) sets the cadence of thought the system can perform. If a corpus is too global, the figure dissolves; too local, it calcifies. Systems that aspire to universality should be made to answer locally; systems that remain local should be allowed to resonate globally. Both directions are needed for a living continuum.
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.
Attuned to the politics of perception and the conditions of sense-making, they examine how architectures of remembrance, whether technological, linguistic or mythopoetic, govern historical transmission and co-constitute posthuman modes of attention, agency, and world-making.
They have presented work at various international institutions such as ICA London, OOT Festival and Frontier Tower, San Francisco. Their contributions to a finalist project for the 2024 SOLO AI award included original sound design and installation development. As a writer, Alexandre contributes to platforms including DIFFRACTIONS, investigating emergent forms of technical memory and their reshaping of human temporality across theoretical and policy frameworks.
How can we truly speak of blockchain-native aesthetics?
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On Digital Frameworks
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.