Art on the Web of Value
Over ten years ago, ESPACE art actuel (formerly Espace sculpture, founded in 1987) took up the challenge of reassessing its critical reflection on the visual arts, which focused primarily on the field of spatiality. The aim was to re-examine how sculpture is defined now that the concept of space is no longer limited to Euclidian geometry, and our relationship to the world has become increasingly complex due to transnational, computer networks crisscrossing the planet. The current issue represents a shift and an openness to the spatial flows that anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls global scapes, such as mediascapes, technoscapes and ideoscapes.
More specifically, this issue focuses on the universe of the blockchain, a true digital ecosystem that is putting pressure on offline institutions and foreshadowing a revision of their structures and methods. The community of blockchain actors is growing and attracting a wide variety of users— from programmers and investors to activists and even criminals—around this technological solution to government control or bank supervision. In the hands of artists, the blockchain’s artistic, symbolic and technical possibilities are emerging to depict lucid and critical practices that contrast with its tech bros’ appropriation.
A blockchain is a database or ledger distributed and shared across a network of many computers simultaneously connected to it. The architecture of the ledger is composed of records or blocks—and not of rows in a spreadsheet, for example—in which different kinds of information can be recorded: a simple transaction or an artwork. When these blocks of programmable and encrypted
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