A utopian blueprint

In 1956, Western countries were at the dawn of a magmatic period that would reach its peak in the socio-political turmoil of 1968. During that year, the avant-garde Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys started to work on an utopical project named New Babylon: a radical attempt to re-imagine the urban landscape and to question fundamental principles of architecture. New Babylon was a speculative city envisaged through media like collages, litographs and maps. This imaginary city was designed as:

“A decentered, multi-layered space for living, with underground and ground levels, as well as numerous layers above ground and terraces as the final icing. Configured as a rhizomatic network of huge links, it was made of a series of interlocking platforms raised above the Earth’s surface upon pilotis. These were built into various autonomous yet connected units—called sectors.” (Source)

This vision was born from a milieu of different perspectives, such as early cybernetics, 60’s urban subcultures, and artistic avant-garde movements, such as the Situationist group, to which Constant belonged to. New Babylon was planned for a ‘ludic’ society, where humanity is free from waged work and free to engage in all kinds of creative activities.

Constant interweaves public and private spaces to articulate a rhizomatic commons. New Babylon was to take shape through the will of its unknown inhabitants: macro-structures would be modular and transformable in their organization of space; micro-environments as well would be shaped by the aesthetic desires of their inhabitants in the form of climatic conditions, light, sound, smell and colour. Its absolute composability is also the reason why New Babylon’s concept was accused of being too ambiguous and utopian. Constant was convinced by the idea that New Babylon could be shaped into its intended form only by New Babylonians themselves. The architect’s project was secondary to the citizens’ movements and the consequent expression of their desires. This reduction of the planner’s role was an heretic move from the point of view of canonical architecture. Yet, for Constant, this was a logical conclusion given his opinion on the role of individuals and collectives in arts:

“This dream, that I call New Babylon, is born out of the dissatisfaction of a modern artist who no longer believes in superior individual creativity.”

From this disappointment, the provocative and liberating idea of an architecture without architects was born. Constant's overarching vision emphasized the power of plural imagination and coordination, envisioning a future where the autonomous desires of people could literally generate a city. Constant wanted his imagined spatial infrastructure to encourage playful, experimental dynamics in the construction of itself: a ludic path to architecture. The idea of play  is central in Constant’s dream:

“Automation has opened the way to a massive increase in the number of Homo Ludens. Huizinga nevertheless had the merit of pointing to the Homo Ludens dormant within each of us. The liberation of man's ludic potential is directly linked to his liberation as a social being.” (Source)

Indeed, some of the traits of New Babylon are prescient of the contemporary digital age. As the previous quote showed, New Babylon exists in a post-scarcity environment, gesturing toward a world in which automation liberated humans from the compression of labor, thus enabling them to enjoy free time and creativity on an unprecedented scale. Also, the idea of embodied connectedness is foundational in Constant’s utopian conception, where relationships are not limited by physical proximity, and is interpretable as a curious precursor of the World Wide Web, with its global, interrelated communication system.

New Babylon was never realized. Constant’s attempt to project a new model of urban landscape and to empower collective creation remained on paper. Yet, its futuristic intuitions still resonate with the emancipatory promises of our networked society.

While Constant’s vision was at odds with the realities and the status quo of the architecture of his time, could there be another future for these intentions at the convergence of new forces? One that doesn’t care about physical constraints, making Constant’s utopian failure a premature vision for a new internet?

Visions of virtual worlds

“For us, social space is truly the concrete space of meetings, of the contacts between beings. Spatiality is social.”  - Constant Nieuwenhuys (Source)

”The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.” – Etel Adnan (Source)

The 2020’s opened with a proliferation of virtual worlds and with a renewed interest in the idea of the metaverse. According to Matthew Ball, the core characteristics of the metaverse include the interoperability of data, the presence of a fully functioning economical system and an experience that moves between the virtual and the analogue world. What is a virtual world? Mark W. Bell’s Toward a definition of Virtual World provides us with a simple and operational definition:

”[A virtual world is] a synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.” (Source)

Scholars like David Banis and Tommaso Guariento showed that the idea of the virtual world has an old lineage and it is a recurrent ambition of digital pioneers. This idea lives at the intersection of many technological dreams expressed in famous sci-fi novels like Snowcrash, Ready Player One or the manga Sword Art Online, and also in analogical phantasmagories like luna-parks. Furthermore, videogame history offers plenty of examples of engaging virtual realities: from sandbox games like Minecraft and Roblox, to gated gardens such as Animal Crossing New Horizons or Fortnite.

The aforementioned cases are among the most compelling actualizations of the idea of the metaverse. The new metaverse cycle aims to use these design and architectural trajectories to build the new internet, where everything will be experienced in an immersive, game-like environment. In this perspective, gamification is just the beginning: the next round of technologies will allow games to eat the world, and be the force to shape it.

Considering that these virtual environments will harbor massive cohabitation and co-creation, the stakes are sky high for all stakeholders involved to govern its infrastructure and its design philosophy. If the metaverse is architected in the image of Web 2 tech giants, it will be the future land of corporate colonization with unprecedented levels of data hoarding, privacy infringement, monolithic aesthetics, gatekeeping, and rent-seeking practices. In order to counter the Silicon Valley apparatus and its hyper-growth and value capture models, peer-to-peer visions for the future for networks of co-presence must be articulated.

Despite the huge "land" grabbing opportunity and the "next internet" promises, no actor is holding a monopolistic position as of now, insofar as there are local dominations. The nature of the metaverse itself will require a paradigm shift from proprietary technologies to interoperable standards that can’t be ensured by any individual players. Significant voices in the industry are leading the way for an open metaverse that features common protocols, similar to the shared language represented by HTML and Javascript for websites. The situation will stay indeterminate for a while, oscillating between different polarities and the future will need brave experimenters - Moving Castles is a good example -  to push it towards bright techno-imaginaries.

In this bubbling transmutation of virtual arenas, the utopian project of Constant illuminates a possible pathway for digital co-presence. The distributed and modular architecture of New Babylon was planned to co-evolve with/through its inhabitants, according to their relationships and desires, without the supervision of a central authority. Could the virtual hyperspace be conceived in the same way? The New Babylon of the metaverse can be described as a peer-to-peer metaverse, based on a decentralized infrastructure, where individuals and groups enjoy the spatiality of their mutually conjured architecture.

This is not only a desirable and hopeful project as much as it is a future necessity. If the metaverse is to become the gateway to most digital experiences, it is critical to learn from the mistakes of the past:

“The Metaverse, championed by Facebook (now Meta Platforms, Inc.) and their peers, allows and celebrates monopoly of digital space, taking what was once collective and ensuring it is privatized and parcelled out to the highest bidder. Their Metaverse expands as a homogenizing monoculture, assimilating ecosystems, displacing extant species, and enclosing digital abundance into enforced, artificial scarcity. Allowed to grow, this proposed Metaverse will be a monoverse.” (Source)

To escape this grim evolution of all too familiar business logic, a new (meta)political imaginary is needed. A virtual world intended as a public good played into existence through its inhabitants through a convivial creative economy. This term, public good, originally coined in the context of commons governance, has experienced a new popularity in the blockchain community as a way to differentiate itself from corporate technologies and the digital private goods which they produce. The brilliant essay Positive Sum Worlds by Other Internet does a great job at clarifying and expanding the notion of public good. Their effective definition is that a public good produces positive externalities. A common question in this research area is the following: for which public, or publics, are we designing this space? According to the essay’s authors, the designation of a specific public will inevitably lead to a certain level of exclusion and under-representation. The designation process should be composable and truly permissionless, allowing users to design the public space(s) themselves and to participate in the public good’s activities. Is it possible to achieve this level of universality by design? No, and it’s also not necessary. Another route, following Constant’s inspiration, would be to not answer directly to the public’s question and instead to create a fluid infrastructure able to respond and adapt to the people’s fluctuating needs, designing adaptivity instead of universality.

Constant himself drafted a description of such a structure in a 1974 text for the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague:

“There are no a priori links between anyone. The frequency of each man's movements and the distances he will cover depend on decisions he will make spontaneously, and which he will be able to renounce just as simultaneously. Under these conditions social mobility suggests the image of a kaleidoscopic whole, accentuating sudden unexpected changes -- [...]. In our case, the urban must respond to social mobility, which implies, in relation to the stable town, a more rigorous organization on the macro level, and at the same time a greater flexibility at the micro level, which is that of an infinite complexity.” (Source)

Here, the Dutch artist suggests a design pattern that is relevant also for the peer-to-peer, meta-structure in question. On one side, the macro-level - the computational infrastructure - has to be rigorously organized with an open source, permissionless, and public architecture to be the base layer on which everything else can be built. On the other hand, the micro-level is the heart of the public experience of this virtual universe and will be ruled according to the principle of endless variation. This design objective takes us further away from the mode of production of the monolithic architect as no single center can effectively compute and respond to the complexity of the intertemporal landscapes of desires, besides those who generate them. Human interactions can fuel a constant re-modeling of the space itself, changing parameters of trust and transparency according to their desires. In a time of metaversal imaginaries, it is crucial to have the capacity to inhabit the digital space we truly desire and encourage granular, diverse associations. The ideal public good space is not singular and it will be assembled by this diverse association instead of being projected a priori; thus, the emphasis is on locality and how a convivial virtual world can emerge just from the federation of different regions. Other Internet’s write-up is again useful in highlighting the local nature of public goods:

“[...] no matter their claim to universality, instantiations of public goods are always local. Locality is created and felt through shared space, time, or experience. Without the assumptions and norms that develop out of this shared context, it would be impossible to identify and make space for things that are in the public benefit. So public goods, even as defined by economists, will always be a reflection of some group's shared context, common beliefs, and moral sensibilities; in other words, their value system.”

A plurality of shared contexts and spaces could then grow to be an inclusive public good, where differences and experimentations are welcome.

Towards collective worldbuilding

By exploring Constant's work, it was possible to reach two principles around which to design a new digital world: macro-persistence and micro-mutation. Where is it possible to find the right analogues which effectively reflect this vision? A good candidate for the infrastructural level is the Ethereum blockchain and the vibrant ecosystem that surrounds it. Ethereum has shown to be fertile soil for innovations such as storage (IPFS), community infrastructures (DAOs), cultural assets (NFTs), reputation systems (Coordinape, Soulbound Tokens) as well as zero-knowledge proof applications (zksync) and scaling solutions (Optimism). Ethereum is a permissionless structure, where participation is not bound to permission from a certain authority, and it acts as a base layer providing the tools and the standard to create new frames able to serve different use-cases. This model stands in contrast to monopolistic entities like app stores or social media platforms which exercise control through permissioning the economic flows on their systems, inhibiting free creation in order to maximize private interest. If the future digital universes are to be designed and populated by users and their creations, it is crucial that their possibilities are not limited by rent-seeking practices and governance of private interest.

To reach a better understanding of these design features, let’s take a look at Ethereum through another lens. Indeed, Ethereum can be defined as an hyperstructure, to use the bold term coined by Jacob Horne in a popular essay to define ZORA protocol. Among different features, hyperstructures are defined as unstoppable and user agnostic. It is really hard to stop a blockchain from running, as it is planned to maintain its integrity even when running from just one node of the network:  “They can continuously function without a maintainer or operator, and they can run for as long as the underlying blockchain is running—which can be at the very least a decade.”

Furthermore, blockchains like Ethereum are agnostic towards their users, which means to be credibly neutral and fair by design: no discrimination or ambivalence is allowed in the code. These characteristics enable Ethereum to be a reliable, permanent base level for the digital universes we are summoning, providing a common ground for variations and integrations to be built upon.

Let’s turn now to the local and mutant aspects of the digital New Babylon. The inhabitants of this shared universe will have the ability to summon their own space. Again, Constant’s words open our techno-imagination:

“New Babylon is a gigantic labyrinthine complex raised above the earth on tall pillars. All forms of transport circulate below it. The various tiers of the city can be reached via lifts and stairs and are almost entirely roofed-in and climate-controlled. With their many levels and terraces, they form a vast multi-layered space that constantly offers new surprises as a result of its functional flexibility, climatic variability and light and sound effects. New Babylonians can wander around like modern nomads, in search of new experiences and unknown sensations.” (Source)

A way to reach this ambitious vision could involve directing the datastreams of users toward a generative process that allows for the emergence of a spatial architecture for individual citizens and collectives. A spatial infrastructure of this kind will unlock new design affordances, imagination conduits, and interaction possibilities. The perception of human relationships and interactions can be expanded once we represent them in a different, architectural way. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard investigated at length The Poetics of Space and how the subjective and emotional perception of the spatial dimension is relevant for human beings:  “For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.”

To grow this intimacy and not be lost in a formless, corporate digital arena, these social spaces need to embody unique personalities according to their creators and thus be projected as autonomous worlds. This expression is used by ludens in the eponymous essay to describe a world that adopts a blockchain as a substrate to emphasize the permanence of the chain infrastructure (on which we touched upon before). Going back to the root of the word autonomy, it is possible to recall a deeper meaning. The term is composed of two Greek words (αὐτο-, auto-, "self"; νόμος nomos, "law"), that when combined mean "one who gives oneself one's own law". To be autonomous does not mean to abandon a shared context, but to create each own rule inside such a context. As the Italian thinker, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi stated: “autonomy is the self-regulation of the social body in its independence and in its interactions with the disciplinary norm.” If Constant envisioned an autonomous city, our imagination can evoke an autonomous ensemble of digital worlds, where self-regulation and self-governance set the condition for full expressivity and freedom. However, it is important to not forget how individual autonomy can only be forged through collective organization and infrastructure (Source). Like the sections of Constant’s city, here the worlds coexist one next to the other in their own individuality while at the same time sharing a common ground and orbiting together to form a greater constellation.

In conclusion, we need to remember that virtual worlds are philosophical tools (Source) and can be used “to materialize philosophical concepts, perspectives, and thought experiments”. Given the relevance of such tools, it is important that we grow a system that can host autonomous, experimental, and intimate virtual worlds. In this way, it would be possible to hijack the metaverse moment and direct it toward a radical transformation and democratization of media where worlds are built by their inhabitants rather than starchitects of the digital realms. More in general, this would also be a moment of proliferation for bottom-up culture and self-made digital craftsmanship, breaking the rules of top-down worlding where contents are created by Hollywood or influencers and delivered to the masses as simulacra that dominate their desires and impulses for consumption.

How do these spaces communicate with each other to create a federated pluriverse? In the previous instance of this series, the self-discovering cryptographic protocols like PGP were analyzed, among the issues of open networks and trust. WoT represents a possible model to federate the network with a relatively simple, yet effective algorithm. In a time of metaversal imaginaries, it is crucial to have the capacity of inhabiting a digital space shaped by our desires and to encourage granular, diverse association. Decentralization here can be conceived as a distribution of autonomy where collectives are able to self-determine their own openness through access control, seizing the means of algorithmic parametrization and conceiving their own architecture as a living being.

The authors wish to thank Arjit Kapoor for extensive research support and Laura Lotti, Erik Bordeleau, Patrick Rawson, Nick Houde, Oliver Klingefjord, Anna Fasolato, and Marco Mattei for their critical insights and precious perspectives. Credits for the cover image go to Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud.

Networks and Trust

“Knowledge is a transductive process: it is not a package passed from person to person, but a system which produces the nodes in the network – you and I – through the very process of circulation.” Dominic Pettman, The Species Without Qualities: Critical Media Theory and the Posthumanities (1)

“Depersonalize trust. Make it impersonal.” Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (2)

Networks exist as a structural model to understand and represent the world. However, they do not exist purely as epistemological frames: they demonstrate an ontological consistency. In biological life, networks function as an intracellular interaction system (cellular network) or a human’s brain activity (neural network). Networks are present in social life too: the economy (trade/credit network), or the social formations on the web (social networks).

A qualitative network transformation happened with digital society: the availability of data fueled an epistemological shift. We now perceive networks everywhere because we have the tools to grasp them. The description and the understanding of network behavior is the object of the study of network science: a common methodology and measurements for a generalized study of networks (4). Networks are described as mathematical graphs in which nodes and/or edges have attributes (e.g. names), usable These attributes can represent “the global structures of the interactions within a system” (5). A network is a high-level abstraction that allows the description of different scenarios through a set of common, universal metrics.

An integral property in a network is the nodes’ capacity to communicate with one another. To do this, it is necessary to develop trust among the nodes. Trust is both an intuitive concept used in daily life, and a far more complex notion.

First of all, trust is one of the foundational facts of every human organization and social structure, from the State to the markets, from security issues to value systems: without it, human bonds progressively unlace and disperse or, in other cases, they are rendered redundant. According to the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann: “Trust occurs within a framework of interaction which is influenced by both psychic and social systems, and cannot be exclusively associated with either” (6). To trust is to expect one set of behaviors instead of another and to choose to be vulnerable to the opposite set of behaviors. Trust is different from rational economic expectations and it may even be the underlying force presupposing an expectation.

Trust is not only indivisible from such systems: it is indeed a sense-making tool to navigate them and reduce their always-increasing complexity. Trust acts on “the future horizon of the actual present”, increasing the “tolerance of ambiguity”. To trust someone is to expect one set of behaviors instead of another and to be vulnerable to the opposite set of behaviors. Trust is different from rational macroeconomic expectation and it may even be defined as the underlying force behind an expectation: trust comes first and whether trust is misguided, the set of expectations shifts in another direction.

For instance, If one trusts the European Central Bank’s power to ensure the Euro’s value, one will expect a consistent continuation of such action and not an abrupt change of policy overnight. Trust, therefore, acts as a filter towards the future as it constrains the infinite possibility space towards likely outcomes, thus relieving the agent of alertness wherever possible.

“Co-ordinated individual action open up trust, by reducing complexity, so revealing possibilities for action which would have remained improbable and unattractive without trust – which would not, in other words, have been pursued.” (7)

In the complex social scenario we inhabit, individual trusted relationships are not sufficient to navigate and act on the world: it is necessary to establish a scale-free model of trust which can encompass collective belief systems of various kinds. Communal trust is not an external quality of the network but an emergent property that grows organically from it over time as a result of (inter)individual relationships (8). Therefore, it is not separable from the context in which it emerges. The philosopher Mark Alfano defines trust as “the capacity of cultivating reliable dispositions according to the socio-technical context (9)”. In a networked society, this means that trust is shaped by the digital technologies that surround us. Consequently, it is crucial for these techno-systems to be reliable or even trustworthy by design (10): trust needs to be depersonalized and scaffolded onto a system.

The necessity of embodying trust in a network is even more urgent in a specific type of network, the open network. The open network works through a decentralized authority and aims to increment the individual user’s autonomy and independence, such as WWW, e-mail, or the BitTorrent protocols. Open Networks align with ideals of decentralization and shared democracy. Nonetheless, the lack of vertical control brings along new design challenges: open networks have an affinity towards attack vectors such as cartel formation and Sybil attacks.

How can we build a network that is resistant to these weaknesses? How can nodes trust other nodes when there is no hierarchical authority? It becomes necessary to grasp the trust circuits that are constantly generated through the interactions between nodes in a network. Yet, this is not easy: trust is something of an invisible force that often eludes quantitative measurements, prone to fluctuations across time. This result is achievable when an operable definition of trust is defined; we turn to Oram & Viega’s simple definition that “Trust is the mechanism we use to decide that a key is valid.” (11).

In a simple interaction space where nodes sign each other's addresses as attestations of trust, the aggregation of these signatures yields a binary trust graph that reveals the distribution of trust throughout the network. Binary trust is either present or absent and it has directionality, which means that trust can be mutual or unidirectional.

Other use-cases require more granularity while registering node signals. A cardinal example is the star rating system which is widely used on various platforms for aggregating user preferences for various services. In these digital spaces, the source of trust is the user’s judgment about the service’s characteristics. Such aggregations compile all inputs in order to generate a universal topology i.e graph state. The utility of a net score allows for applications to derive objective attributes like sovereign identity, spam, quality, etc. While useful, these applications do not accommodate any subjectivity beyond the ontology of the trust algorithm.

Moreover, some applications are attempting to introduce subjectivity mechanisms such as Personalization Vectors of PageRank or Strategies in TrustNet. These weighting algorithms convert a topology with an objective distribution into infinite possible topologies by means of user subjectivation. For instance, the weights on the graph can be adjusted based on a classification input from the user. This is where personalized search results, curated feeds, recommendation engines, and the like originate. In cases when these preference orderings are organized en masse, algorithms tend to reproduce echo chambers where only the content that has already been discovered and interacted with is presented. This tendency can have serious consequences:

“Excessive homophily, however, helps to spread misinformation, frequently resulting in homogeneous, polarized clusters reiterating emotionally charged and externally divisive content“ (12)

When the mega-recommendation systems are sovereign, they decide who you should trust according to their own (commercially-minded) metrics, leading to an inhibition of self-discovery practices. It is important to have platforms that also allow for the emergence of novel subjectivities. This idea is reflected in the ethos of digital gardens, where values of encounter and curiosity — even at the price of chaos — are privileged over optimization and order.

How is it possible to bond together self-discovery and subjective trust? How can a secure, open network expand without a central authority?

The Web of Trust

The Web of Trust, built on top of the platform of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), is a cryptographic protocol designed by Phil Zimmerman in 1991 in the context of the Cypherpunk movement. The Web of Trust offers a way to bind identities with the corresponding public keys in the form of certificates without relying on a central authority. It is a discovery mechanism; in it, users sign each other’s certificates and this mechanism originates a directed trust graph in which edges represent signatures.

When a user needs to obtain information about a certificate issued by an unknown user, he/she has to check for the presence of one or more trusted parties in the list of signatures associated with that certificate. The result is a system where users sign certificates of other users and retrieve information about the trust level associated with a certificate. Through these dynamics, the network propagates subjective trust, as every user is verified by a unique set of introducers (trusted intermediaries).

Web of Trust can also be depicted as a free association of trusted parts, mimicking the idea of the free association of producers from the anarcho-communist tradition. Free association is a utopian envisioning of a liberated world where workers associate themselves freely and according to their own capacities on an egalitarian decision-making basis. From this, a democratic production network emerges that functions thanks to member cooperation. The Web of Trust is similar, not issuing trust to the network’s participants according to some centralized, pre-established criteria, but instead through free and spontaneous relationships (in the context of a specific architecture).

In the Cypherpunk tradition, the exchange of public keys usually takes place during special meetings, named cryptoparties. In the early ‘10s, these convivial moments evolved into a nomadic institution, a global grassroots movement promoting P2P networks, end-to-end cryptography, and other privacy-enabling tools. In this context, trust was conceived according to an algorithmic, functional definition as well as a human component of personal interaction and shared conviviality. Through cryptoparties, the network grew all around the world without any centralized coordinator. A small operation — the key signing operation between people — can lead to a wider sociotechnical architecture and movement. As the physicist Guido Caldarelli argued:

“There must be some small-scale mechanism that, iterated through a great number of interactions, ends up generating a structure that is organized at the large-scale level.” (13)

The emergence of an order renders the network as something more than just the sum of its individual nodes. The network is an informational environment, an Umwelt [1], retaining trust indicators and coordinating users. This falls in line with the idea of stigmergy, defined by the P2P Wiki as a series of “environmental mechanisms to coordinate the work of independent actors”. It is also defined as local patterns that result from past constructions that provide cues for future architecture. Stigmergy is a method to inscribe the signs of collective intelligence into the network so that other agents can determine and incite subsequent actions according to those traces. For example, in OpenPGP WoT (a specific iteration of the protocol), trust is signaled in two ways:

‘Introducer trustworthiness’ refers to how much another user is trusted to apply care when verifying an identity. This value is determined and stored locally for every locally known user ID. ‘Public-key trustworthiness’. is the degree to which a user claims to be sure of a key-entity binding. Before using someone else’s public key, users must determine the key-entity binding and assess whether it’s likely to be correct. (14)

As the latter sentence reveals, the network environment, enriched with informational traces (who is the most trustable part, etc.), allows nodes to grow orientation and understanding.

From this perspective, Web of Trust constitutes a form of swarm intelligence, where individuals are collectively driven to a specific behavior, without relying on a leader. Group coordination is instead embodied in the network’s architecture, a socio-technical structure that facilitates the growth of the network through the repetition of an endogenous and simple dynamic (the key signing activity) based on a specific trust ontology. So, the cryptographic protocol combined allows for indirect, traceable communication of trust attribution (stigmergy) that fuels people into building this immanent structure that is the network. At this point, it comes naturally to recall Luhmann: an increase in trusted relationships doesn’t simply reduce the complexity of the system; on the contrary, it allows it to coordinate and exist, increasing the overall possibility space.

This text is the first part of a series. In the next iteration, we will investigate what the spatialization of Web of Trust could mean for peer-to-peer shared realities.

[1] The idea of Umwelt has been developed by the Baltic German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll and may be defined as the perceptual world in which an organism exists and acts as a subject

The authors wish to thank Alex Espinoza and Pekko Koskinen for extensive support in research and Laura Lotti, Erik Bordeleau, Victoria Ivanova, Patrick Rawson, Nick Houde, Gary Zhexi Zhang, Jeein Shin, Anna Fasolato and Marco Mattei for their critical insights and precious perspectives. Finally, deep appreciation for Sam Hart, Sarah Friend, Billy Rennekamp, Arthur Roing Baer & Moving Castles, Distributed Gallery, Terra0 and their pioneering praxis.

Introduction: the necessity of mutation

A viscous feeling of paralysis is among us. Spiraling acceleration and fatal stagnation co-exist. The urgency for renovation is exorcised through critique: taxonomies of the system proliferate in universities, museums, and other institutions. Yet, despite their precision, many of these analyses fail to engage with the state of asphyxia. An uncanny question arises: is the endless act of defying the box, reinforcing the box itself?

The answer is a complex one that echoes across disciplines. In a system that rewards the objective, where seeing is believing, and to observe is to know, creativity is subject to functional rationality too. Faith in the exposé and of moral indignation pervades so that the space we give to what should be obfuscates what could be, perpetuating a static loop that objectifies possibilities a priori. There is a pattern that scintillates in history and headlines, in axioms and trends. Unnoticed but certain, in some moments it has become packaged, obscured of meaning and purpose. Beyond the limits of sight and speech, it is the pattern of mutation that still offers an aperture of possibility, departing from cynical paralysis to renegotiate the edifice of critique.

This first installment is intended to survey the morphology of relationships in aesthetic and economic practice to propose a concept in which these patterns may take on shapes. In doing so, it speaks of mechanism art, an emerging mode of creative production that interlaces art and economics. As a forming concept, for now, it may be thought of as art that refashions systems of value to articulate alternative socio-economic configurations. Mutant and mutating, this emerging paradigm could be a directed vector out of the contemporary standstill. While this first episode is conceived as a non-linear journey that follows the emergence of mechanism art, the next installment will move on to the affordances that mechanism art allows.

Relationality as medium

In 1992, the 303 Gallery in New York City presented "Untitled (free)," the first solo exhibition of a young Thai artist. On the day of the opening, visitors could hardly recognize the gallery, as the backroom contents were put on full display, and the newly emptied office was transformed into a temporary kitchen. There, a smiling Rirkrit Tiravanija was preparing and serving Thai vegetable curry where he was often mistaken for a caterer leading to playful and funny encounters. Through food, Tiravanja cast a spell on the gallery and created convivial moments in which art is simply experienced as "what happens between people".

Tiravanija is among artists who compose social bonds and relationships as a form of artistic expression. Their works behold relational aesthetics, a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud which recognizes artist-arranged social circumstances as montages of reality. In serving food or sending party invites, these gestures compose an interactive space that allows for social connections to emerge at an enfold of experiences, simultaneously unfurling into a model of "possible universes," materializing the moment as an image. These “moments” as inherently transcendent artifacts were perceived as boundary-pushing concepts that could liberate art from the private gallery space, as they could exist anywhere, impermanently, as interactive fields, secured by the intangible sharedness of all who were there. Such co-creating involves “the engineering of intersubjectivity” (2), or the idea that new subjectivities within situations may blossom from the artful worlding arrangements. In short, these moments belonged to the involved: the artists, formerly known as the audience, and therefore valued on the “sum of social relationships”.

“The interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system.” (3)

Art as an alternative montage of reality, a laboratorial space for re-imagining what exists, relational aesthetics expresses the potential to abstract social activities and human-nonhuman interactions into a proliferation of experimental pluriverses. What is at stake here is the idea that in such situations new subjectivities may blossom thanks to the artists’ mini-worldbuilding capacity and the artistic ritual capacity to propose models of relations and interaction.

The idea of modeling interconnection between entities as a way of doing art is at the center of different traditions. Thirty years before Bourriaud, the visionary Behaviours and Futuribles Manifesto was published in the United Kingdom. Its author, key theoretician, and pioneering cybernetic artist Roy Ascott foresaw art’s role as an object for relationship design:

"Consider the art object in its total process: a behaviourable in its history, a futurible in its structure, a trigger in its effect." (4)

The artwork should engage the viewer in which she may be able to manipulate, interact, and forge something new from it. Cybernetic Art’s ideas emerged during a period in which computers and digital technologies became commercialized, re-shaping ways of interacting. These morphisms expedited, condensed, and expanded human perception on such a scale that they were incorporated into artworks, transforming viewers into active participants by embodying interaction and process as a new medium.

Art is about creating an opera aperta (open work) (5) that can be manipulated and interpreted in pluralistic ways: the work of art is a system that semiotically lives between artist and spectator (6). Ascott held a similar perspective and, following the first-order cybernetic tradition, he borrowed ideas from thermodynamics to define these kinds of artworks as ‘cold’. Their informational structures are loose with many possible interpretations and public feedback (7). Relations are the fabric of any cybernetic system and Ascott’s artworks are no exception. The cybernetic artist is firstly interested in the articulation of a system and the virtual set of possibilities that are embodied within it.

In contrast to Bourriaud, the relational aspect of cybernetic art is catalyzed through an object rather than through a convivial situation. This conception derives from the artist’s interest in remote communications between computers but also in spiritual and holistic practices, such as the I Ching, Navajo sand painting, and Druid rock formations (8). For example, he organized the first worldwide I Ching casting in the context of Ars Electronica 1982. These exhibited objects offer a virtual set of possibilities and would reach within and throughout the system, inspiring Ascott’s mechanism design practice. To create an artistic system like those made by Ascott one has to design the invisible, namely, to imagine and to a certain extent anticipate the possible relationships and affordances an artistic system can offer to users and players.

The bond of economic relationships

Art has always had an intimate and yet tacit relationship with economics. While economics is the regulation of what is useful (e.g. goods and services) and what is profitable (at the price of exploitation), art resides in the realm of non-necessity, in which objects may even lose their canonical utilitarian value in becoming artworks (e.g. Duchamp’s Urinal). So dramatic is the transformation that artworks circulate in a parallel market where the bond between art and economics appears in the conspicuous consumption of non-necessity objects.

These disciplines have been intimately linked since ancient times. The Roman Emperor Augustus (27 BC-AD 14) had a close relationship with political advisor and friend, Gaius Maecenas who also became one of the wealthiest men in the Empire. Maecenas used his wealth to promote and finance poetry in Rome, from the majestic works of Virgil and Horace to lesser-known poets like Propertius. A true appreciator of poetry, he understood the pivotal role arts play in establishing an identity for the new Empire. As a statement to its relevance, Maecenas’ name became the word for “patron” in many European languages - mécénat in French, Mäzen in German, mecenate in Italian - to define economic patronage towards the arts. Following Maecenas is a long-standing tradition of arts patronage, including the Medici Family during the Renaissance, Peggy Guggenheim in the 20th century, but also in public funding from the State.

For one of the first times in Western history, art and money revealed their inherent interdependence: artists needed investments and powerful and rich actors needed art to celebrate and perpetuate their influence.

This is an example of how economical power shaped artistic evolution from the outside. Nevertheless, since the Second World War, art and economics have progressively forged a powerful relationship. The art market has expanded and globalized like never before and artworks, especially pieces of contemporary art, have become important assets in the financial trade. What prompted art and the financial economy so close? Is it just the exploitation of a new market? Or a deeper affinity is at play here?

Max Haiven, researcher at Lakehead University, argues for the former possibility: contemporary art “appeals to and reflects the ‘soul’ of financial practice” (9), as the two disciplines share similar nature and both navigate the “immaterial world of relationships, probabilities, conjectures, and opportunities”. Indeed, under a certain perspective, finance is about “convincing others that one’s immaterial, abstract assets have value, that one's representations of wealth are credible (Marazzi, 2010)”: it has a core linguistic and cultural component. This resonates with the current state of artistic production:

“Ours is a moment of postmodern skepticism towards any essentialist claims to art’s value, when the practice of art itself has been thoroughly ‘dematerialized’, and when, as Boris Groys (2011) points out, critical art can be defined (at least in part) by the way it calls attention to its own process of transforming objects/spaces/practices into art. In other words, contemporary, critical art creates itself by somehow alerting us to its own production as art. It is art to the extent it gives itself value as art, to the extent it earns our credulity. Like a financial asset, contemporary, critical art gains its legitimacy and value as a gesture within a field of other similar gestures, and in ways that, ultimately, rely not on any objective criteria but on their capacity to achieve (at least temporary) credibility and believability within a specific symbolic and material economy” (10)

Thus, art and the financial economy resemble each other when it comes to the way value is created. It is precisely the power of relational networks that assign value to human objects in both disciplines. This process can be described in different ways. In mainstream economics, it is the fluctuating tide of supply and demand that determines the price of goods and services. In Marxist economics, it’s the social value of labor’s time that generates this inner quality. In the art system, it’s the shared community of artists, curators, investors, etc. that assign value to a certain artistic piece: what Walter Benjamin defined as “exposure value” (Ausstellungswert).

Through these comparisons, it is clear that economic value is also a result of contingencies, since community participation is primary when establishing the metrics of its own economy and, eventually, when adopting a different system. The priorities of any given group are amenable to change: resource extraction can be prioritized over biodiversity and regeneration, individuality over collectivity, and so on. It is an inherently relational process, comparable to Bourriaud's aesthetic understanding. While its rules falsely appear as “natural”, it can only appear between us as something shared, a channel that exists through the performativity of “the economy”. This resonates with the words of anthropologist David Graeber, that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” (11)

However, as the perpetuation of profit-centered measurements shows, it is not so simple and immediate as it sounds: the roaring power of ideology suffocates or assimilates every call for differentiation while promoting the ruthless financialization of daily life over any other form of value-creation. The “absence of alternatives” is another component of the general status of paralysis we described above: it is rare to find room for solid experimentation in the current economic world as it is for artists to emancipate themselves from financial dynamics. Current value systems are reinforced in the name of stability, efficiency, and due to the lack of alternatives. Clearly, some notable exceptions challenge hegemony.

The provocative Venture Communism proposal from the Telekommunisten art group dates back to 2005 and it’s an interesting case of heterodoxical economic ideas mixed with arts. Another example is the Robin Hood Coop, an investment cooperative that tried to “hack” high-frequency finance to invest in commons-oriented projects, showing a wide-open mentality and creativity in approaching current economic prejudices.

Furthermore, the emergence of cryptoeconomics and the Web3 ecosystem are significantly lowering the entry barrier of economical experimentation and spreading a collective interest in economic-microsystem design and development. Cryptoeconomics is a subset of economics that:

“uses cryptography to prove properties about messages that happened in the past [and] economic incentives defined inside the system to encourage desired properties to hold into the future, entwining code and economics in unprecedented ways” (12)

In Laura Lotti’s interpretation, this unique mutation of code and economics: “unlocks the imagination and ideation of new ecosystems of value through a combination of cryptography, economic incentives and interaction design” (13). These emerging systems can be thought of as hybrid artworks that meld with technical mechanisms to facilitate the synthesizing and unraveling of relational modes. There’s no passive viewer: the legitimation of the artwork fully depends on actor participation. Artistic intent is embedded in software and economic design, necessitating new ways of being active in extended networks. Art and economics become transparently intertwined, offering agency to artists instead of being subjected to financial markets.

A thrilling example is an idea put forward in Interspecies Games by Curve Labs for the Sovereign Nature Initiative. The project is presented as an attempt in realizing, through software, a philosophical proposition: Man and Nature are not separated and distanced; on the contrary, they are radically interconnected and interdependent. Using mechanism design for technologically-mediated interaction and an RPG-inspired game narrative, Interspecies Games provides a framework for human-nonhuman relationships, forging ways of interbeing. Here, economical mechanisms are rewired towards regenerative environmental efforts, along with the desire to summon derivative forms of agency. Its hybrid essence is a snapshot of what can truly mean to blur the boundaries of games, art, economy, and mechanism design.

The tendency towards speculative hybridization can be also observed in Sarah Friend’s output. As an artist and software engineer, her work is a brilliant exploration of the new terrains brought about by crypto-technology and automated systems at large. Off is a multi-dimensional piece of art: it starts as a collection of NFTs dropping on the project website. These NFTs are double-face: the “public” side is a black image that corresponds to the exact pixel dimensions of a certain screen (computer monitors, smartphones, and tablets); while the “private” side is only distributed to collectors by email and it contains two things: an encrypted sentence and a shard of the private key that was used to encrypt it, plus further game instructions. The entire collection (255 images) hides a full essay and the entire private key that encrypts it: to unlock it, it is necessary to assemble ⅔ of the key shards. The faith of the project will depend on the collective behavior and coordination of the collector: will they collaborate to unify the essay’s pieces or will extractive egoism prevail? Off uses crypto-tools to create a “massively multiplayer prisoner's dilemma” that promotes collaboration as the optimal relation towards others. However, the outcome is not certain and players could ally in teams, or one wealthy player may buy everyone else out and assemble the essay.

Forging networks of care and collaboration is a key concept also for Sarah Friend’s other project, Lifeforms. Lifeforms is a collection of NFT-based “creatures”: these entities have to be given away within 90 days of receiving it or they will cease to exist.

Lifeforms encourage the practice of dispossession, which becomes crucial for the perpetuation of the artifacts themselves. It inverts the NFT logic of holding onto something until it’s valuable, typical of many crypto-collectibles like Cryptopunks. Again, this project is characterized by an unpredictable nature: for instance, high-price auctions have been observed with the risk of not selling the Lifeform and letting it die in a wallet. As the artist remarked in this interview, both Off and Lifeforms can be described as “contingent systems” (14), that changes based on the behavior of the audience. Through such creations, Sarah Friend adopts contingency as a catalyst for experimentation and play. Value systems become malleable and can be re-engineered to project new principles and ideas thanks to the availability of new technologies.

The emergence of mechanism art

Let’s recap the core elements of the scenario so far depicted. Relations can be the medium of artistic expression, whether they are forged through the creation of human situations (Bourriaud) or the affordances of an artwork-system (Ascott). Relations are also a common element shared between contemporary artistic practices and economics, especially in finance. In these contexts, what it’s produced through relationships is value: thus, value has to be considered as the product of contingent decisions, principles, desires, and stereotypes. Value is something that can be rearranged with different priorities and configurations. This doesn’t happen often, due to a certain paralysis in economical, social, and political imagination but also due to an objective difficulty in finding the right setting for this kind of experimentation, as good experimentation needs care, time, and patience. However, the emergence of crypto-economy and Web3 technologies is opening spaces for this kind of intervention as it creeps beyond the grounds of financial primitives, towards speculative cultural production. Yet, these innovations are still in their infancy and need a vast experimentation process before they can act on the world. The best way to distribute a sense of agency to the public is through endowing them with the mechanisms of value mutation and collective artistic practice offers a singular intellectual space to engage in these types of speculative inquiry.

Mechanism art is an attempt to frame and provoke this quest for a new alphabet that can straddle the deployment of aesthetic, financial, and technological symbols and materials as hybridized media to impact reality. To talk about mechanism art is to discuss a hypothesis on a possibility that’s simultaneously not yet here and has long arrived; a crucible of forces colliding from the past and the near present. Together, they weld a new concept for creative production, a unique “mode of articulation between ways of doing and making” (15), and aesthetic practice that curbs the impulse for stoic representation. Mechanism art moves beyond the cynical attitudes toward technology and economics by wielding artistic powers to synthesize new social interiorities.

To carry on the pattern of mutation of mechanism art, it is necessary to plant the seeds of economic creativity in the social interstices opened up by art. Economic media can become a new canvas to collectively experiment with the conception and production of value. The power of generating situations, time-space configurations in which different rules apply, needs to be reinforced and used to challenge the catatonic moment we find ourselves in. There’s a shift in perspective here: we abandon the cynical sensation of stuckness and we learn instead how to “better inhabit the present” (16), how to embrace Dionysian force to patch together different tools and thoughts, moving towards the possibility of new forms.

This is the challenge of mechanism art: to perceive economics as a vitalizing medium for artistic production and to artistically make economics an experimental practice— a de-hegemonizing force against the seemingly omnipotent monolith of economic rationality. To make economics experimental means re-conceptualizing methods to valorize previously hidden entities and actions while revitalizing and expanding the Ancient Greek understanding of the term (oikos nomos: the law of the house). Far from being only the idea of the household, economics has to do with ethics and a specific idea of a good life (17). Economics was the condicio sine qua non that allowed people to engage in noble activities like philosophy and politics. In its Greek conception, means and ends overlapped—production was not a goal in itself. It is such a vision that we have to re-vitalize, making economics something different from a static, poisonous mega-machine. With this in mind, our desire is to move away from Greek univocity towards gardens of mutative ecologies.

Descending from the lineage of art to encounter the unseen, mechanism art grasps what has always been invisible to the embodied hand, revealing it as a collective body to signal a renewed conception. Mechanism art needs to profane the broken formalism of individual rationality of economics, to overcome the artificial divide between art and economics, and to learn how to play with the junction of these interwoven fields. To embrace the radical contingency of value systems and become the designers of the world to come, turning artistic production into a massive multiplayer co-wordling.