INTRODUCTION
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.
The second trend is schizocollage—maximalist digital collage that crams wildly different styles and references into small images. Unlike blockchain formalism, schizocollage can exist without NFTs. In fact, it did. But digital collage is the method by which most NFTs are made. Artists who make schizocollage NFTs use the same software tools as makers of normal NFTs, but they misuse them and overuse them. The resulting works offer commentary on the kind of digital art that circulates as NFTs and its social function in online communities.
Blockchain formalism and schizocollage are two genres of NFT art that reflect particular ways of seeing what the internet is and how it works. The abstraction of blockchain formalism lays bare the computational processes of online networks and the social formations they facilitate. Schizocollage addresses the cultural content of those networks and the behaviors that play out across them. The communities who produce and collect art in these genres espouse ideas that can be arcane, esoteric, edgy, ugly, or otherwise off-putting. Their social codes make it hard for this work to be absorbed by the art world, even when you set aside the art world’s aversion to digital art. But this marginal status is what makes them interesting to explore. Even if the art and ideas are weird, they are arguably at the forefront of shifts in culture and technology.
I’ll be discussing these trends in two newsletters. This one first one is about schizocollage. I’ll address the genre’s antecedents in other forms of collage and what sets it apart from them, especially the use of software in its creation, as well as the culture of the NFT markets that encouraged its maximalism to flourish.
Two Trends in NFT Art
PART 1: SCHIZOCOLLAGE
In 2009 the artist Charlie White published a great essay on digital collage in Artforum. He located its origins in paper collage, running through a history from dada and surrealism to hobbyist collage that proliferated thanks to craft stores and cheap magazines. The apogee of collage for White is the aesthetic of high-school locker interiors and teenagers’ bedroom walls in the late twentieth century. The collage artists that interest him make work with a self-consciously juvenile aesthetic; their work pulls references together to express a messy coherence of identity, a pupal stage of the self. White’s artistic and social history of collage prefaces his discussion of Polyvore, a Web 2.0 platform that encouraged teen girls to make moodboards of products they like—to use digital collage as a way to express their preferences of style and consumption. Polyvore was supposed to evolve into a digital marketplace for clothes and accessories, but it never took off.
Meanwhile, another approach to collage was taking shape just outside White’s view. This was a maximalist collage that expressed not the self but the pluralistic chaos of the internet. One of the artists who exemplified this approach to collage is Parker Ito, who in the early 2010s began exhibiting paintings that alluded to digital collage and used its techniques. The way he documented these works on his website was itself a form of collage, mixing installations shots with found photos and animated gifs. His painting practice grew out of his net art; he had made websites like Tasteless Maximalism that densely layered moving and blinking found images. Last year, in an interview with Dean Kissick ahead of the release of his first NFT collection, Ito reflected on the origins of his work as a painter, saying he wanted to make “paintings that feel like a lot of different things simultaneously.”
Ito came to NFTs relatively late. Many peers and friends from his early net art days had minted works in 2020 and 2021 and reaped the benefits of the bull market. But his entry was well-timed, because by 2024 there was an active scene of NFT artists making maximalist collage. This scene took shape gradually, during the NFT gold rush and in its aftermath.
In fall 2021 a crypto investor I’d known a decade earlier when he was a writer and editor told me I should look at Bonkler, a project by an art collective called Remilia. The art is usually credited to an artist known as Sprite Bonkler or Henry Sprite, but other members of Remilia also took part in their creation. A new one was released every day and sold in online auctions. The Bonklers are pixelated portraits of androids that have odd, angular limbs. They seem to be assembled from various kinds of objects and bodies. The composition of each image is roughly the same, but the figures appear in a range of backgrounds (photo studio, forest, bleak roadside strip), with a range of accessories and pets. I liked the tension between chaos and order in these images: the repetitive composition and the changing constituent parts, the unified pixelated aesthetic and the referential hodgepodge.
The stylistic plurality of Bonkler persisted in Remilia’s other projects, like MiladyMaker, a set of 10,000 portraits of anime girls in idyllic settings. MiladyMaker was released in summer 2021 as a collection of profile picture NFTs, or PFPs. Collectors who bought PFPs would use their favorite one as their avatar on Twitter, to show off an expensive acquisition or simply to signal affiliation with a community of NFT collectors. The financial success of the Bored Ape Yacht Club PFP collection, launched in April 2021, spawned countless imitators and triggered the stereotype of NFTs as “monkey pictures.” The pictures are based on a drawing by All Seeing Seneca of a slack-jawed ape with drooping eyelids, and their facial expressions and fashion accessories vary. The template for PFPs was created somewhat inadvertently by Larva Labs, who released CryptoPunks in 2017. This was also a series of 10,000 portraits with varying facial features, hair, and accessories. But the traits of the Punks weren’t compiled like digital paper dolls. The portraits in 24x24 grids of pixels were generated from a few lines of code stored in the blockchain token. Punks were released before the term “NFT” was in use. They were an experiment in digital ownership that influenced the NFT protocol. Bored Ape Yacht Club capitalized on what NFTs later became: tradeable assets and social signals.
MiladyMaker functioned as both a PFP collection and a commentary on PFPs. It connected the dots between two forms of social signaling: PFPs and fashion. CryptoPunk traits are a random assortment of beanies and 3-D glasses, ’60s hairdos and wild white mops. The clothes on the Apes are just goofy. The accessories used in MiladyMaker can be recognized by people who follow streetwear. Miladys are valued not just for the rarity of their traits, like Punks and Apes are, but also for their “drip score,” a rating of how cool rare accessories look together in an outfit. It adds another dimension to the kind of NFT appreciation that revolves around scoping a digital portrait’s features. It’s also a canny interpretation of how fashion works now. The New Models podcast often discusses how young people today don’t develop an identity through an affiliation with a particular subculture, the way teens did in the late twentieth century. Instead, they sample lots of different subcultures, looks, and references. MiladyMaker splices this way of being cool with the process of making PFPs by randomizing combinations of traits in little digital portraits.
There is something weird and cultish about yoking online identities to near-identical images. Remilia recognized this, and they’ve taken the use of PFPs to the point of absurdity by encouraging Milady holders to take part in a collectivized performance. People who have Miladys as their profile pics on X will quote and copy each other’s tweets, turning extremist pronouncements about various social or theoretical issues into social media spam. They engage in a pseudo-poetic practice called “jadeposting,” using automated translation apps to put phrases into Chinese and then back into garbled English. The people who do this are anonymous, which emboldens them to parrot language that is racist and misogynist, mixing and matching repellent ideologies as if they’re fashion accessories. I don’t want to get bogged down in a discussion of Remilia’s many cancellations—I was never involved in them, and I don’t want to do enough research to say anything worthwhile about them. The best account of Remilia drama I’ve seen is on cuckcore.de, where the narrative is cut up into chunks of one or two sentences, alternating with the Bro Explaining meme. The anonymous author knows how tedious it is to rehash the story of juvenile online feuds but, heroically, does it anyway.
Cuckcore.de also is a hub and an archive for Gay NFTs, a splinter group of artists who appreciate the visual language of Remilia and want to explore it further without taking part in the social messiness of Remilia’s schizoid identity performance and ideology play. Cuckcore.de is a living archive of this movement. It has images of collages on paper and paintings for sale, links to critical writings and experimental fiction. There’s also a list of links to collections in the Gay NFT canon, made by artists who are anonymous or pseudonymous.
One of these is called Mifella, an appropriation of MiladyMaker’s neo-chibi style but with boys instead of girls, which reads as a rebuttal to the guys who go wild online after donning a Milady as a girlish avatar. Remilia’s NFT collections break from the crisp vector graphics of mainstream PFPs, and Mifella takes that further, with exaggerated smudges and pixelation. The style of the portraits is more varied. The jawline can be hard-edged or soft and blurred. The eyes can be moist and kawaii, or scrawls of zoned-out spirals. The mouth might be a red gash or a surprised, dainty hole. The prickly, rasterized backgrounds locate the Mifellas in places like Pulkovo Airport, the Kremlin, and Hiroshima. Some Mifellas have a translucent overlay of an image of 9/11.
MiladyMaker and Mifella complicate the trait logic of PFPs with cultural references and bristly textures. But they can still be readily recognized as PFPs. Drifella, another Gay NFT collection by an artist known as Evil Biscuit, blow the format up. These images are made with the same kind of software used to compile traits for Bored Apes and its imitators, but Evil Biscuit used the tools to the point of distortion. The central figure isn’t treated as a body so much as a field for image fill, one that’s often taken up with textures, patterns, or “aura” gradients rather than facial features. You can just barely make out the contour of the baby dragons embedded in the collage. The images are crowded with tattoos, overlays, texts in clashing fonts, and abstract markings and scratches. Drifella exemplifies a kind of digital collage that is entirely unlike the Polyvore moodboards that Charlie White wrote about in Artforum. They have nothing to do with expressing the self. They’re about the self getting eaten up by teeming hordes of images.
Earlier, I argued that artistic explorations of maximalist digital collage preceded the NFT market. It has been interesting to see artists who were making net art and post-internet art enter the NFT space and put their take on the schizocollage aesthetic, mixing and layering disparate styles without necessarily adopting the PFP format
Tabor Robak’s Broken Printer, released on Verse in 2024, is a collection of 2175 NFTs that layer logos, stock photography, and expressive digital drawing, then distort them with imitations of the streaking and smudging that happens in the outputs of physical printers. The compositions are themeless and abstract—they’re grounded by a few images that are piled up with others, and there’s no identifiable logic that would make the selections seem coherent. Each one feels a bit like a rapid ride through successive eras of computer aesthetics in the ’90s and ’00s, mixing slick commercial images with goofy cartoons from Microsoft’s clip art library. Robak decorates these artifacts of paper printings: registration marks, lightly sprinkled dots of ink, and the frizzled darkness you see when a photocopier’s light captures the void at the edge of a page. Yet the layering he does is distinctively digital. Broken Printer is about navigating the desktop and using computing peripherals. It’s about the user’s objects of attention, while the user’s personhood remains elusive and undefined.
10,000 Oil Paintings was Parker Ito’s first NFT collection, released with Zien last year, and it translated his maximalist, collagelike method of painting to traitmaxxing NFTs. If you know his work, you can recognize the iconography here. There are figures from Durer etchings and characters from video games, sometimes blended into merged identities that Ito draws himself. The images in 10,000 Oil Paintings are not PFPs. The variation from one image to the next is too great for them to be classified that way. There aren’t always figures in them, and when figures appear they’re often off-center, as components in a multipart composition. They look like Ito’s paintings, and they were paintings. Collectors who purchased an NFT could also claim an oil painting that matched it, made on demand at a studio in China.
In May Ito released another NFT collection, Horses?2. If 10,000 Oil Paintings were basically digital versions of his paintings. Horses?2 look more like applications of his style to Gay NFTs. The horses are recognizable and consistent. And the title and subject matter pay homage to the NFT collection Horses by an artist known as Toshiba Brand Manager. And yet they still don’t look quite like standard PFPs. The horse, like many elements of Ito’s collage paintings, is taken from a Durer engraving, so it has a grace unlike the cartoons that usually appear in NFTs, and it’s seen at full height, mid-stride, which gives the image more dynamism than the PFP’s typical head-and-shoulders portrait. Many of the images in Horses?2 have rectangles that decenter the composition. It’s a tribute to PFPs but it still looks like Ito’s paintings. In late June Ito released Drilady, a collection that stakes out a new ground just past the end of the line from Milady to Drifella. In terms of composition, these are typical PFPs. But the ladies and fellas in the earlier collections are kids. Driladys look more like the bimbos and sexpots that appear in Ito’s paintings. The collage sources include clippings from porn and furry art. Ito is doing schizocollage karaoke, and it’s a weirdly horny performance given the asexual tastes of most NFT collectors. He’s taken up the standard PFP form but put his own stink on the content.
In a recent studio visit, Ito told me he likes schizocollage because it’s the purest form of his art. When he makes a painting, he begins by composing it in Photoshop, then realizes it as a physical object using complex printing processes and the help of many assistants. But when he makes an NFT, he just exports his Photoshop file. There’s no fabrication. Just minting. The technique, the medium, and the display are fully aligned.
Maximalist collage can exist in many mediums, but it is a fundamentally digital process. It relies on the layering tools pioneered by Photoshop. It’s enhanced by the automation of the collage software used to make PFPs. Schizocollage takes a promiscuous approach to selecting material, and delegates parts of the artistic process to software; these traits are two ways of rejecting the twentieth-century idea of collage as an expression of individual subjectivity. Schizocollage is pluralist and dispersed. While Polyvore encouraged a skeumorphic digital collage that re-created the language of the high-school locker on a website, schizocollage embraces digital textures and processes, erasing the connections to its antecedents on paper, even when it manifests as a print or a painting.
Schizocollage has been current in the NFT scene for a few years now. Some might say that the aesthetic has run its course, that the copycat collections mimicking the look of Mifella and Drifella have leeched it of originality. But the artists behind those collections are continuing to experiment. They show the method still has potential. The projects by artists like Ito and Robak do, too. Like paper collage, schizocollage is versatile enough to constantly yield new ideas. Even when the current NFT trend passes, it will continue to be a vital genre of digital art.
PART 2: BLOCKCHAIN FORMALISM
The viewer completes the work.
The work is not made by the artist alone. The viewer contributes to it by connecting it to the world.
These chestnuts of twentieth-century art theory imagine the artwork as open, and its relationship with the viewer as a foundational yet dynamic aspect of its existence. While this idea is enshrined in theory, what it describes is abstract. It remains an idea. But artists working with the blockchain have seized on the smart contract as a way to make the relationship between the artwork and its audience concrete. Relations become inscribed and actionable, manifested by the laws of code.
This realization has been in blockchain art since its beginnings. Rhea Myers made inscriptions on blockchains as early as 2014 in order to engage with the ideas, values, and principles behind their workings. In 2017, Larva Labs created CryptoPunks as an experiment in digital ownership—an attempt at understanding what it means to own a digital object that preceded and influenced the NFT protocol. Autoglyphs, Larva Labs’s 2019 series of generative abstract drawings, includes the code in the token, so that each piece is a self-contained art-making machine. These are just a few significant examples of how artists used blockchains to encode ownership, transactability, and the paths of art’s distribution.
In 2021 many artists made works that considered the various kinds of relationships that the blockchain can foster beyond ownership, or reflected on what ownership might mean. They did this partly in response to the hyperactive speculation on the NFT market, and partly to continue exploring their own long-standing interests. Sarah Friend’s Off was a set of black quadrilaterals based on standard screen sizes; these tokens were tickets to playing a puzzle that could only be solved through the holders’ collaboration. Manny404’s mannys.game was likewise a collectively playable puzzle where the holding the NFT designated affiliation with the community of players. Friend also made Lifeforms, which encoded a fragile lifespan in the smart contract: each token self-destructs if it’s not transferred every ninety days, so the work survives only through active care and exchange. The black-and-white images of Deafbeef’s Entropy undergo a process of artificial degradation each time they are transferred, visualizing how the meaning of an artwork can change along with its ownership.
The vast majority of NFTs traded in 2021 functioned as indexes: the smart contracts pointed to image or media files stored off-chain. By contrast, artists interested in the relationships encoded in the blockchain emphasized works that were fully on-chain or, in cases like Off or mannys.game, at least contained executable code that created conditions for interaction. In these works, the NFT’s uniqueness had a clear purpose—it was the mechanism by which participation, continuity, or belonging was structured. When the speculative boom subsided, artists who treated the blockchain as a medium in itself continued to develop these ideas. They did so, however, in dialogue with two conventions that crystallized during the boom: on-chain generative art, standardized by the Art Blocks marketplace, where an NFT instantiates an artist’s algorithm at the moment of minting; and the PFP, a model of editioned ownership that also signals affiliation with a community through its use as a profile picture on social media. Since 2021, both formats have become defaults for concepts of digital ownership. Artists working with the blockchain now respond to these conventions as they explore how relationality can be coded, enacted, and traced through transactions.
I think of the art that does these things as “blockchain formalism.” It is art that takes the blockchain itself—its structures and capacities for encoding relations—as its subject. Much of it extends the legacy of abstraction in visual art. Just as early twentieth-century abstraction gave visible form to metaphysical states, blockchain formalism gives shape to the invisible but world-defining force of computation. It often draws on the basic geometries of digital image-making—pixels, vectors, ASCII characters—while mapping them onto the social architectures the blockchain supports: transactions, ownership, and the affiliations or friendships that emerge through the shared ownership of an artwork. In this sense blockchain formalism builds on two popular genres of NFT art. If PFPs model collective identity, and generative art demonstrates the algorithm’s aesthetic potential, blockchain formalism merges the two. It uses abstraction not only to visualize computation but also to frame the blockchain as a social computer. In doing so, it operates as both an aesthetic language and a belief system, grounded in the expressive force of computation and the hopes projected onto the blockchain’s promises of transparency, permanence, and decentralization.
There is some irony in using “formalism” to describe this work. After all, in the context of twentieth-century art history the term was used to refer to work that was entirely self-contained, art that was fully absorbed with its own medium. Blockchain formalism is likewise absorbed with its medium, but its medium is a distributed computer. The relationality and the connections between artwork and audience that were anathema to twentieth-century formalist art critics are essential to the blockchain as a medium. That tension between the abstraction of form and the specificity of relations is what makes this work compelling. And the tension inherent in the term “blockchain formalism” makes it an appealing label for this work.
When artists first turned to blockchain as a subject, their work often interrogated the belief systems that drove enthusiasm for the technology. The aforementioned inscription works of Rhea Myers, for example, treated concepts such as the blockchain’s promise of eternal inscription as matters of faith, exposing the utopian rhetoric surrounding distributed ledgers. From this critical stance emerged what I would call “blockchain conceptualism”—art that engages the blockchain in the abstract, drawing attention to its cultural myths and symbolic claims. In contrast, blockchain formalism takes the blockchain’s structures and promises as givens, translating them into visual and material form. Below I’ll explore how it does this through a discussion of several recent projects.
Terraforms (2021) by the studio Mathcastles aspires to build a metaverse from scratch, a low-res virtual world. The scale of its ambition, the scope of its worldbuilding, and its interactive properties make it an important touchstone for blockchain formalism.
Each of the 9,910 tokens in Terraforms is a 32-by-32 grid—an ASCII terrain parcel within a twenty-level structure called the Hypercastle. The parcels have visible traits (colors, pulsing symbols, animation speeds) and invisible ones (location metadata, X/Y coordinates, and mode). Owners can switch a parcel from its original “terrain” state into “daydream” mode, where they draw ASCII art directly on-chain, and then into “terraform” mode, which locks those drawings permanently. Because the initial shift from terrain to daydream is irreversible, the supply of unaltered terrains can only decrease over time.
The tokens of Terraforms contain everything they need to render their visuals, including font data. The on-chain existence of Terraforms is crucial for its conception as a reflexive work that describes the distributed computation that makes it possible. If the metaverse is often imagined as a seamless alternate world, Mathcastles insists on showing its inner workings: the ASCII symbols that flicker across the tokens are not merely images of a world but signs of the text instructions that generate it.
Mathcastles treats code as art. Other artists see the materiality of the screen and its techniques of producing imagery as ways of visualizing computation. Kim Asendorf has worked with pixels for more than a decade, but not in the familiar idiom of pixel art, which uses blocks of color to mimic three-dimensional space. Instead, his practice treats pixels as if they obey their own physics. His early pixel-sorting algorithms manipulated luminosity in ways that gave pixels weight, as in Mountain Tour (2010), where landscapes found online were distorted into cascading flows. If those works relied on recognizable scenes to demonstrate the effect of code, his more recent projects—Monogrid (2021), Sabotage (2022), Alternate (2023), Cargo (2023), XOX (2024)—explore the expressive potential of pixels as elements of pure abstraction.
PXL DEX (2025) develops this investigation into simulated sculptural form. Pixels float within isometric cubes that rotate as viewers interact with them, creating compositions that flicker between two- and three-dimensionality. The illusion is compelling because it draws on the logic of physical reality: pixels move as if they were tangible objects contained by the screen. The density of pixels grows as collectors acquire $PXL tokens, a mechanism that links visual form directly to blockchain transactions. The sculptural illusion establishes the pixel as a discrete object, and tokenization literalizes that objecthood within the metaphysics of the NFT economy, where images accrue value and permanence through their inscription on-chain. In aligning the smallest unit of digital vision with the smallest unit of blockchain exchange, Asendorf transforms pixels into both aesthetic and economic matter. Computation becomes visible as the material of social exchanges and transactions.
While most works of blockchain formalism use Ethereum, You Are Here (2024) by 0xfff maps the blockchain universe through a simple but striking device: one mintable token for each chain. Each time a token is bridged from one chain to another, the transfer leaves a visual trace, situating the owner in relation to the wider blockchain landscape. An arrow and text mark the position not of the viewer but of the user who most recently transferred it. This gesture prioritizes the perspective of the token holder as the primary position inscribed by the work. Lines, arrows, and minimal forms take on indexical weight. In a network where every action leaves a record, even the simplest schematics become a map of relationships.
ABO (2025), a collaboration between 0xffff and Leander Herzog, extends this logic by explicitly modeling community. Each ABO token can be connected to up to six others, and each connection alters the composition of its geometric form. The artists chose six as the maximum because it approximates the size of a single sustained conversation—say, a dinner party around one table. The edition size is 150 because that is Dunbar’s number, the supposed cognitive limit on the size of stable social groups. These design choices embed the artwork in a theory of social scale, while its minimal visual language—stacked color bars adapted from Herzog’s earlier work Downloads (2024), inspired by the progress bars of early file-sharing—grounds it in the aesthetics of computation. ABO visualizes these connections (its name abbreviates “abonnement,” which means subscription in French and German), translating abstract networks of affiliation into form.
While ABO gives form to affiliation at the scale of community, Jonathan Chomko’s Aesthetic Constant (2025) turns to the scale of the individual body. His work maps on-chain relationships as a middle ground between the specificity of friendship and universal interpersonal dynamics. It encodes traces of human presence in abstract forms that evolve as more tokens are minted. The animations in Aesthetic Constant are derived from motion-capture footage of the artist’s friends walking on a treadmill, abstracted into bouncing dots that instantly register as bodies in motion. It’s pareidolia for the body—minimal signs that nevertheless activate recognition of the human form, a callback to Chomko’s other works at the intersection of performance and systems design.
Aesthetic Constant makes social activity legible through code. Each token draws on the wallet address of its first collector to generate an animation from Chomko’s motion-capture data. Chomko personally invited collectors to take part in the initial minting process, which conferred on them the ability to invite more collectors, and so on down the chain. Each round of minting modifies the initial animation, blending the traces of previous iterations. The result is a work that accumulates and transforms as it circulates, making relationships of ownership and invitation visible as shifting forms on-screen. In this way, the project materializes multiple layers of relation: friendships encoded in the source data, connections enacted through token minting, and affiliations structured by the invitation-only minting system. Its abstractions carry a lyrical charge—the moving dots are at once anonymous and specific, tied to bodies known only to the artist but resonant as universal signs of human presence. Aesthetic Constant turns blockchain transactions into evolving portraits of association, rendering social bonds in dynamic, minimal forms.
A work of art you own is more meaningful than a work you see somewhere. Ownership intensifies attention. This is another truism of art that blockchain formalism codifies. Works in this genre often introduce protocols for encouraging and shaping attention. I thought about this over the summer through my own experience of owning Absence (2025), a project by Material Protocol Arts. I first encountered the piece in May, at a group exhibition at Galerie Yeche Lange in New York. There, I printed a receipt with a QR code that I could scan on July 1 to open a slow-moving animation of a flower concealed by planes of black. These dark patches would disappear each day I looked at the flower for the rest of July, gradually showing me more of the artwork I’d collected. But I didn’t first access it on the appointed day—the receipt was misplaced, then I left for a trip—and by the time I recovered it, more than a week had passed. I faithfully visited my flower for the rest of July, but the delay meant it would never be fully revealed.
In a digital environment where we scroll through hundreds, even thousands, of images each day, how does a single image become meaningful? Absence offers one answer: by placing obstacles in the path of access, and by encouraging rituals of return and contemplation. I understand it as a work about attention. Many NFT projects are about attention, but most—like NounsDAO, whose goal is simply to make its signature “Noggles” ubiquitous—seek to exploit the Web 2.0 attention economy, turning visibility into value. Absence instead suggests how blockchain technologies might support alternatives. Where Web 2.0 platforms harvest attention in order to monetize it, blockchain formalism experiments with encoding attention itself, using smart contracts to structure the way a viewer encounters and sustains a relationship with a work.
Material Protocol Arts is led by Matto, who I first encountered thanks to the explainer videos he made about Terraforms. His work helped me understand the project as a vision of the metaverse as an open, programmable terrain on the blockchain mapped out in ASCII art. Material Protocol Arts has also made a monumental virtual work called Cycles (2024). While Absence orchestrates attention in time, asking viewers to unfold a hidden image slowly, Cycles also conceives of attention in spatial terms. It is described as a virtual sculpture, and it comprises glyphs and blocks of solid color that accumulate in elaborate patterns, then get distorted as the effects of live code ripple through them. It can be viewed through isolated perspectives called “lenses.” Since Cycles is a dynamic work, the way it looks through each lens shifts over time, though collectors have the option to “freeze” a lens and preserve a particular view. This also alters the ongoing process by which the work evolves.
Digital sculpture is often associated with 3D models, virtual objects that simulate the forms of physical sculpture. But Cycles uses “sculpture” differently, to refer not to the form but to the fact this art is made to be contemplated from multiple perspectives. Cycles is constituted of views from hundreds of angles. It uses the metaphor of sculpture to foreground the shared space of the blockchain’s distributed computer.
Attention has been a concern of software art on the blockchain for some time as a way of addressing relationality, and it has often been explored through experiments with ownership. Simon de la Rouviere’s This Artwork Is Always On Sale (2019) encodes a patronage model, requiring each successive collector to pay the artist a yearly royalty equal to five percent of the purchase price. The collector is prompted to think about the work each time this fee is extracted. The NFT of Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Good Night (2021) represents a social obligation enacted off-chain, with the artist sending nightly greetings by text message to the token’s current holder. These works use the blockchain not only as a medium of ownership but as a means of modeling relationships—between artist and patron, between collectors, between artist and audience. A more recent work in this vein in Jan Robert Leegte’s Walled Garden (2025). The work is a 3D rendering of a garden surrounded by a circular wall. Each token represents an opening in the wall, a perspective on the garden and the other openings across the way. A view on the garden is fixed to a relation of ownership. It’s social, too—collectors can see the handles of other collectors whose windows are in their view.
Harm van den Dorpel’s Ethereal Self and Ethereal Others (2008) offer a counterpoint from the Web 2.0 era. The first displayed a faceted gem in which users could see their reflections if they granted the site access to their computer’s camera. The second compiled the resulting images into a grid of faces, images of the visitors in their homes looking into the screen. Together they distilled the attention economy to its essence—people want to see themselves online, and will trade their privacy to do so.
What distinguishes blockchain formalism from such predecessors is its conviction that blockchain technologies can reconfigure the conditions of attention. If Web 2.0 platforms thrive by extracting and exploiting it, these projects use smart contracts, coded obligations, and controlled access to cultivate more deliberate, contemplative encounters. They suggest that the blockchain’s relational structures—its capacity to encode transactions, commitments, and collective identities—might also be turned toward shaping meaningful forms of digital attention.
Blockchain formalism takes the tools of generative art but redirects them toward relations rather than pure form. Its concern is not the shapes algorithms produce but the structures of attention and connection that emerge from their use. Works like Terraforms reveal the paradox of the blockchain itself: at once an invisible substrate and a hyper-visible ledger of every action inscribed on it. Blockchain formalism reflects this condition, foregrounding the instructions and codes that usually hide beneath the smooth surface of the screen. By keeping elements like pixels, tokens, and coordinates discrete, it highlights the relational scaffolding of the networks through which digital art is distributed.
I began this essay by identifying schizocollage and blockchain formalism as the two most significant tendencies in recent NFT art. Though visually distinct, they converge in their shared focus on the mechanics of the internet today—on the relations, structures, and effects that shape digital images. But where schizocollage foregrounds content and cultural references—images, desires, the noisy excess of online environments—blockchain formalism turns inward, to the phenomenology of the screen and the protocols of the network. Schizocollage explores how collectible images plug into broader circuits of culture; blockchain formalism shows how images are parts of processes structured by transactions, contracts, and coded relations. They are both forms of blockchain-based art concerned with the visible as well as infrastructural properties of the internet—art about the relations through which the digital image, and its value, come to life.
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
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.