#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
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.
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.