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.
Title
Title
Title
TITLE
TITLE2
TITLE3