The Inner Force of Things: Material Agency from Craft to Code

Part 1 of Resistance as Material — a series on art, power, and digital infrastructure

This is the first of three essays tracing a line from the handmade object to the blockchain protocol — asking what it means to make political art when your material is code, your canvas is infrastructure, and your audience is a network. Part 2 examines the architecture of digital manipulation. Part 3 proposes a counter-architecture.

We inhabit a world that aspires toward the frictionless. As Paul Valéry observed in his preface to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on mechanical reproduction, we have reached a state where visual and auditory images are supplied to us at a “simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”¹ In this swipe-to-refresh reality, objects and experiences feel immediate yet strangely hollow. The strangeness is a symptom: a world stripped of its resistance is a world where the stubborn density of things has been liquidated in favor of effortless consumption.

But what if resistance is more than a political posture — more than a “no” shouted at authority? The philosophical journal Aion locates the concept’s roots in physics: the endurance of materials facing shock and deformation.² Resistance is a force that shapes art, science, and the structure of existence itself. To engage with the world is to encounter its resistance, and it is through this friction that we find the foundation of any will.

This essay traces a line from the handmade object to the digital algorithm, asking what happens when the “material” an artist works with is no longer wood, wool, or oil paint, but code, data flows, and blockchain protocols. It is an essay about material agency in digital art — and the argument is this: digital infrastructures are not neutral tools. They are materials with their own agency, their own resistances, their own agenda. Political art in the digital era means working with these materials against their built-in logic — making visible what the infrastructure is designed to hide.

I. What Benjamin Saw Coming

In 1935, Walter Benjamin published an analysis that still functions as the operating system for most debates about art and technology. His argument is deceptively simple: mechanical reproduction — photography, film — strips art of its “aura,” which Benjamin defined as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close an object may be.³

The aura is tied to an object’s singular existence in time and space. A medieval Madonna seen once a year during a religious festival possesses something that a photograph of the same Madonna, pinned to a dorm room wall, does not. Benjamin called this the shift from cult value to exhibition value: when art was embedded in ritual, its existence mattered more than its visibility. When art becomes reproducible, the relationship flips. The copy replaces the original, and a plurality of copies substitutes for a unique existence.⁴

This sounds like loss, and Benjamin does not shy away from the word “liquidation.” But his analysis cuts deeper than nostalgia. He recognized that the decay of the aura also freed art from its dependence on ritual. When the criterion of authenticity ceases to apply, art’s total function reverses. Its basis shifts from ritual to politics.⁵ Benjamin was optimistic. The decades since have added two further stations he did not foresee: decoration — art as atmosphere, as wallpaper, as lifestyle accessory — and, most recently, content. Content is the terminal stage: it no longer matters whether the work is political, ritual, or decorative. What matters is whether it generates engagement. The distinction between a protest painting, a medieval icon, and a sofa-matching print collapses into a single metric: clicks.

What Benjamin could not foresee — but what concerns us here — is what happens when reproduction itself becomes the medium. A digital file does not merely reproduce an original; it is the original. An SVG graphic stored on a blockchain has no “first copy.” Its aura, if it has one, lies elsewhere: in its code, its provenance chain, its relationship to the network that sustains it. The question is no longer whether mechanical reproduction destroys the aura. The question is whether digital materials can generate something that functions like an aura — a unique presence — through entirely different means.

Benjamin also introduced an analogy that resonates far beyond his own era. He compared the painter to a magician, who heals by laying on hands while maintaining a natural distance. The cameraman, by contrast, operates like a surgeon — not physically close, but penetrating the fabric of reality through close-up, slow motion, and montage, revealing “unconscious optics” that escape the naked eye.⁶ Film, he argued, was the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on the human eye.

Replace “film” with “algorithm,” and the analogy still holds. An LLM tokenizer performs surgery on language, cutting sentences into fragments that no human would choose. An SVG filter chain runs a text through mathematical transformations — turbulence, displacement, erosion — that produce visual results no hand could replicate. These are surgical instruments operating on cultural material. They reveal structures that escape conscious perception. And, like Benjamin’s camera, they do so through a “reversed picture” — the output never quite matches the input.

II. When the Wood Talks Back

Before we reach the digital, we need to understand what “material agency” means in the physical world — because the concept is less intuitive than it sounds.

In the contemporary art world, there is a persistent tension between fine art and craft that Nicole Burisch calls the “Look Ma, I just found ceramics” moment.⁷ When fine artists adopt traditional craft materials — clay, fiber, wood — without the skill or cultural knowledge that craft communities carry, the result can feel like trespass. Critic Sarah Archer has noted that the “sloppy” or “unskilled” use of craft materials by fine artists can feel offensive to the craft community, as if centuries of cultural memory were being cast aside.⁸

The tension matters because it reveals something about the materials themselves. They are not passive. They carry what Burisch calls “historical material baggage” — a constellation of tools, skills, expectations, and behaviors.⁹ Skilled makers have internalized rules about how a material is “supposed to” be used. These rules are not arbitrary. They emerge from the material’s physical properties, its cultural history, and the bodily knowledge of generations of practitioners.

Philosopher Jane Bennett pushed this observation further with her concept of “vibrant matter,” describing the capacity of things to act as quasi-agents with trajectories of their own.¹⁰ This is not animism or mysticism. It is a recognition that materials exert forces — they resist, they bend, they crack, they flow — and these forces shape the outcome of any creative act as much as the maker’s intention does.

The most vivid illustration comes from Mi’kmaq artist Ursula Johnson, whose basket-weaving practice embodies a principle her great-grandmother Caroline Gould articulated with precision: the maker does not manipulate the wood — the wood manipulates the maker into understanding what it can do.¹¹ In Johnson’s work, traditional basket-weaving techniques produce an armor-like bust that traces the limits of the human body, navigating the intersection of self, state, and material. The form is not imposed by the artist on the material. It emerges from the forces within the material itself.

Janet Morton’s performance Road Trip (2012) makes the same point through a different medium. A man wearing a full-body wool suit unravels it while walking. The wool thread becomes an active force, provoking contortions that intervene in the rhythm of the walker’s body.¹² The material is a co-performer with its own physical logic, and that logic shapes the work as much as any choreographic decision.

What these examples share is a reversal of the conventional maker-material hierarchy. The maker does not simply impose form on passive matter. The material pushes back. It has propensities, limits, histories, and — in a meaningful sense — preferences. Creation is not imposition. It is dialogue.

III. Karen Barad: Matter Is a Verb

The examples above describe material agency as something artists encounter in practice. Physicist and feminist philosopher Karen Barad provides the theoretical foundation that explains why this encounter is not anecdotal but ontological — meaning: it says something fundamental about the structure of reality.

Barad’s framework, which she calls “agential realism,” begins with a provocation: matter is not a thing. It is a doing. In her formulation, matter is “substance in its intra-active becoming — not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency.”¹³ This is not metaphor. Barad is a trained quantum physicist, and her argument draws on Niels Bohr’s insight that the properties of a particle do not exist independently of the apparatus used to observe them. The act of measurement does not reveal pre-existing properties — it produces them. Observation and reality are not separate; they are entangled.

Barad extends this principle beyond the physics lab. If the properties of things emerge through interaction — or, in her terminology, “intra-action”¹⁴ — then agency is not something that humans possess and objects lack. Agency is a relationship. It is distributed across the entire apparatus: the observer, the observed, the instruments, the context. No component has agency in isolation. Agency happens between.

For art practice, the implications are significant. When Johnson says the wood manipulates the maker, she is not speaking loosely. She is describing an intra-action in which the properties of the basket — its shape, its strength, its form — do not pre-exist the weaving process. They emerge through the encounter between maker and material. Neither the maker nor the material determines the outcome alone. The outcome is a shared production.

Barad insists that this ontology — this account of how things come to be — is inseparable from ethics. She calls her framework “ethico-onto-epistemology”: a single compound word that refuses to separate questions of being (ontology), knowing (epistemology), and responsibility (ethics).¹⁵ If we are always already entangled with the materials and systems we work with, then we are always already responsible for how those entanglements play out. There is no neutral position. There is no view from nowhere.

This matters enormously for anyone working with digital materials. If matter is not passive but actively participates in producing outcomes, then code is not a neutral tool, algorithms are not objective processes, and blockchain protocols are not value-free infrastructure. They are materials with agency. The question of material agency in digital art is not a metaphor borrowed from craft — it is an ontological claim about the structure of the systems artists work with. And anyone who works with them is entangled with — and responsible for — what they produce.

IV. Donna Haraway: There Is No Innocent Eye

If Barad tells us that observation and reality are entangled, Donna Haraway tells us that observation is always positioned — and that pretending otherwise is not objectivity but deception.

In her 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges,” Haraway dismantled what she called the “god trick” of scientific objectivity: the claim to see everything from nowhere, to produce knowledge that transcends the position of the knower.¹⁶ This trick, she argued, is not objectivity but a specific kind of power — the power to universalize a particular perspective while hiding the body, the location, and the interests behind it.

Haraway’s alternative is not relativism — the claim that all perspectives are equally valid and equally limited. That position, she recognized, is just as paralyzing as false objectivity. Instead, she proposed “situated knowledges”: knowledge that is explicitly partial, embodied, and located, yet capable of making strong claims about the world. Objectivity becomes not a view from nowhere but a view from somewhere — accountable, contestable, and connected to other partial perspectives through ongoing dialogue.¹⁷

Three years earlier, in her “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), Haraway had already mapped out the political stakes of this position. The manifesto argued that the boundary between human and machine, nature and culture, is not a fact of nature but a product of power. Cyborg politics, she wrote, is a struggle for language and against “the one code that translates all meaning perfectly.”¹⁸

Read that sentence again in the context of contemporary AI. Large language models are, at their core, systems that attempt to translate all meaning into a single code: a sequence of numerical tokens. Every LLM tokenizer performs exactly the operation Haraway warned against — it reduces the plurality of language to a computable format, flattening ambiguity, irony, and cultural specificity into statistical probability. Different models cut the same sentence at different points, producing different fragments. The cuts are not neutral. They reflect the training data, the design choices, and the economic interests of the companies that built them.

Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge is the conceptual antidote to the illusion of algorithmic objectivity. Every algorithm is situated: it was built by specific people, trained on specific data, optimized for specific outcomes. Acknowledging this situatedness does not make the algorithm useless. It makes it honest. And honesty, in Haraway’s framework, is the precondition for accountability.

V. Yuk Hui: Whose Technology Is This?

The thinkers discussed so far — Benjamin, Barad, Haraway — are all embedded in Western philosophical traditions. Even when they challenge those traditions, they operate within their vocabulary. Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui asks a more fundamental question: what if the Western understanding of technology is not universal but parochial?

Hui’s concept of “cosmotechnics” proposes that technology is not a singular, universal phenomenon but is always shaped by the cosmological and moral framework of the culture that produces it.¹⁹ Western technology, rooted in Greek techne and filtered through the Enlightenment, treats nature as a resource to be mastered and optimized. But this is not the only possible relationship between humans and their tools. Chinese landscape painting (shanshui — literally “mountain and water”), for example, embodies a technical practice in which the goal is not mastery but resonance between the human and the cosmic order.²⁰

The implications for digital art are sharp. Blockchain technology, AI, and algorithmic systems emerged from a specific cultural and economic context: Silicon Valley, venture capital, the ideology of “disruption.” When these technologies are adopted globally — by artists in Lagos, Berlin, São Paulo, or Hong Kong — they carry that context with them. Hui’s argument is not that non-Western cultures should reject these technologies, but that they should reinvent them. His term for this is “technodiversity”: the cultivation of different conceptions of technology through diverse forms of thinking and practice.²¹

In Art and Cosmotechnics (2021), Hui pushes further, arguing that art has a specific role to play in this reinvention. Art, he suggests, operates as a resistance against the calculative rationality of contemporary technological society — a mode of experience that opens access to what he calls “the incalculable.”²² Where the algorithm reduces, art expands. Where the tokenizer fragments, art holds together. This is not romanticism. It is a structural analysis of what different modes of engagement with the world can and cannot do.

For political artists working with digital materials, Hui’s framework poses an uncomfortable question: when you mint an NFT on Tezos, write a smart contract on Cardano, or train a local LLM on your own texts, whose cosmotechnics are you participating in? And is it possible to build — from within these systems — something that follows a different logic?

VI. The Conatus of Code

There is a philosophical concept that ties these threads together, and it comes from Baruch Spinoza, writing in the seventeenth century: conatus. The will to persevere in one’s own essence.²³

Spinoza described conatus as a universal force of self-preservation that resists any external force attempting to change it. Every entity — human, animal, stone, institution — strives to maintain its own being. This is not a conscious decision. It is a structural property of existence itself.

The editorial of the philosophical journal Aion draws on both Spinoza and Foucault to make a provocative claim: resistance is not a reaction to power. It is prior to power.²⁴ Since power represents the submission of will, resistance must be the internal, vital force that makes the will possible in the first place. Were resistance not inherent in the will, we would speak only of obedience.

This redefines the act of creation. Making art is not a response to oppression. It is the expression of a fundamental force that precedes any political arrangement. Deleuze and Guattari, cited in the same editorial, describe the philosopher’s task as being a “creator of concepts” — striving to offer new possibilities that exist beyond the deactivating force of common sense.²⁵ The same applies to the artist: not reacting to the world as it is, but insisting on the world as it could be. That insistence is the conatus of creative practice.

Now: do digital materials have conatus?

The question sounds absurd until you work with them. An SVG filter chain resists certain operations — it will produce artifacts, distortions, unexpected color shifts when pushed beyond its computational limits. A blockchain protocol resists modification — its entire architecture is designed to make alteration costly and traceable. A tokenizer resists semantic coherence — it fragments meaning according to statistical patterns that have nothing to do with human understanding. These are not conscious resistances, but they are structural ones. They shape what is possible and what is not, what the material will “let you do” and where it pushes back.

If Barad is right that agency is distributed across the apparatus, and if Spinoza is right that every entity strives to persist in its own essence, then digital materials do have something functionally analogous to conatus. They have built-in tendencies, structural preferences, and resistances that shape the work as much as the artist’s intention does. The artist who ignores these resistances produces naive work. The artist who understands them — who learns to read the material’s grain — produces work that carries the weight of its medium.

VII. Reading the Grain of the Digital

What does it mean, concretely, to read the grain of a digital material?

Consider the LLM tokenizer. When a political text — say, “Surveillance capitalism undermines democracy” — is fed through different tokenizers, it is broken into different fragments. One model might split “undermines” into “under” and “mines.” Another might keep it whole but fragment “capitalism” into “capital” and “ism.” A third, trained primarily on non-English data, might treat the entire phrase as a sequence of unfamiliar subwords, producing a fragmentation pattern that reveals more about the training data than about the sentence.²⁶

These cuts are not arbitrary, but they are not meaningful either — at least not in the way the original sentence is meaningful. They are statistically determined: the tokenizer fragments language based on probability distributions derived from its training corpus. The fragmentation tells you something, but what it tells you is not about democracy or surveillance. It tells you about the dataset. About which words appeared frequently enough to survive as whole tokens and which did not. About which languages were overrepresented and which were treated as noise.

An artist who visualizes these tokenizer cuts — mapping them as shapes, colors, spatial relationships — is not illustrating a technical process. She is making visible a power structure. The tokenizer’s cuts are the seams where economic interest, data availability, and computational convenience meet. They are the places where the infrastructure decides what counts as a “word” and what does not. Making those seams visible is a political act in Benjamin’s sense: it shifts the function of the material from concealment to exposure.

The same logic applies to SVG filters. An SVG feTurbulence element generates Perlin noise — organic, textile-like textures produced entirely from mathematics. The parameters (baseFrequency, numOctaves, seed) determine the output, and they can be bound to external data. A displacement map (feDisplacementMap) can distort geometric order through organic turbulence, producing visual metaphors for the decay of structure. These are not effects applied to an existing image. They are the image. The material produces the form.²⁷

And the blockchain itself is a material with pronounced conatus. Its fundamental property is permanence: what is written cannot be deleted. This permanence protects political art from censorship — a work stored on-chain survives platform shutdowns, corporate decisions, and government pressure. But the same permanence that protects also exposes. A work permanently linked to a wallet address becomes a permanent record of its creator’s political position. In a changed political climate, the immutable record becomes immutable evidence.²⁸

This is not a flaw in the material. It is the material’s conatus. The blockchain persists. It resists deletion. That resistance is simultaneously the artist’s shield and the artist’s exposure. Working with this material means accepting both — or finding technical strategies (pseudonymous wallets, zero-knowledge proofs, collective publication) that modulate the tension without resolving it.

VIII. Material Fluency in the Age of Algorithms

Burisch’s concept of “material fluency” — the deep, skilled understanding of a material that allows a maker to reposition it in new contexts²⁹ — acquires new urgency in the digital realm. What would material fluency look like for an artist working with code, blockchains, and AI?

It would mean understanding not just what these systems do but what they want — in the sense that Johnson’s ash wood “wants” to bend in certain directions and resists bending in others. An LLM wants to predict the most probable next token. A Proof-of-Stake blockchain wants to reward those who already hold the most tokens. An SVG renderer wants to produce sharp, scalable vector graphics — but its filter system can be pushed toward painterly, organic textures that subvert the medium’s native precision.

Material fluency also means understanding what Hui calls the cosmotechnics embedded in a tool. Every technology carries a worldview. The artist who uses a technology without questioning its embedded assumptions is not working with the material — she is being worked by it. Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge applies directly: there is no innocent use of a technology. Every use is situated, positioned, entangled with the interests and assumptions of the people who built the system.

This does not mean that using corporate technologies is inherently complicit — just as using oil paint does not make a painter complicit in the petrochemical industry (though it does raise questions worth asking). It means that material fluency in the digital age requires a doubled awareness: awareness of what the material can do, and awareness of what the material was designed to do. The distance between those two — the gap between possibility and intention — is where political art lives.

IX. The Inappropriate Discourse

There is one more concept from the craft world that translates powerfully into the digital context. Theorist Minh-ha T. Pham proposes what she calls an “inappropriate” discourse to counter the appropriation of materials and patterns by dominant cultural industries.³⁰

When high-fashion designers adopt patterns — like the “Chinatown bag plaid” — they often ignore the material’s longer history and its circulation outside Western power structures. Pham’s counter-move is to focus on what cannot be appropriated: the properties of the material itself, its specific material fluency, its physical and cultural weight. By attending to the things that exist outside systems of power, we challenge the authority of any single tradition to control how a material is seen.

In the digital context, the “inappropriate” discourse points toward the properties of code and protocols that resist corporate capture. Open-source software, CC0-licensed art, on-chain transparency — these are structural properties of digital materials that function like the grain of Johnson’s ash wood: they push back against the logic of enclosure and proprietary control. They insist on openness the way the wood insists on bending in a particular direction. They are not political choices imposed on a neutral medium. They are properties of the medium itself, activated by an artist who knows how to read them.

X. Questions That Remain Open

This essay has argued that digital materials — code, algorithms, blockchain protocols — are not neutral tools but materials with their own agency, their own resistances, their own structural tendencies. The concept of material agency in digital art, grounded in Benjamin’s analysis of reproduction, Barad’s agential realism, Haraway’s situated knowledges, Hui’s cosmotechnics, and Spinoza’s conatus, provides a framework for understanding what it means to work with these materials as an artist.

Several questions remain open — deliberately so. They will be addressed in the subsequent essays of this series, but they are worth naming here, because they shape the terrain:

If cooperation is mathematically superior to competition — as recent developments in game theory suggest — why do the dominant digital architectures systematically prevent it? The Knowledge Stack analysis of dark patterns, the manipulation architecture of surveillance capitalism, and the game-theoretic implications of Zero Determinant strategies will be the subject of Part 2: The Architecture of Manipulation.

If digital materials have agency, can an artist build a counter-architecture — a system that uses the material’s own properties against its embedded logic? A concrete attempt to do this — using SVG as a native blockchain medium, CC0 as a political gesture, and on-chain transparency as a structural ethic — will be the subject of Part 3: Art as Counter-Architecture (coming soon).

And one question that this series cannot fully resolve but must hold open throughout: who is speaking? This text was developed in conversation between a human artist and a large language model. The ideas originated in the artist’s research, her studio practice, her political commitments. The writing was shaped by a statistical model trained on an incomplete slice of human knowledge — a model that predicts probable tokens, not one that understands meaning. The boundary between authorship and tool use is blurred here in ways that Haraway’s cyborg politics anticipated and that Barad’s intra-action framework can describe but cannot resolve. The transparency about this process is itself a form of material fluency: acknowledging what the material is, what it can do, and where its limits lie.

Notes

1. Paul Valéry, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” (1928), quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). ↩
2. Aion: Journal of Philosophy and Science 1 (2024), p. 2. The editorial traces the concept of resistance through physics, philosophy, and politics, arguing that resistance is “the ontological foundation of any will.” ↩
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), Section II. Benjamin defines the aura as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” ↩
4. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Section IV. The shift from cult value to exhibition value is mapped through a progression from Stone Age cave paintings (made primarily for spirits, not human viewers as Benjamin, drawing on the ethnography of his era, argued) to photography and film (made exclusively for reproduction and public display). ↩
5. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Section IV: “When the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice — politics.” ↩
6. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” Section XI. The magician/surgeon analogy maps onto the painter/cameraman distinction: “The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.” ↩
7. Nicole Burisch, “From Objects to Encounters: Renegotiating Craft in the Contemporary Art World,” in Making Otherwise. Burisch attributes the phrase to critic Garth Clark’s observation of fine artists’ cavalier treatment of ceramic traditions. ↩
8. Sarah Archer, quoted in Burisch. Archer critiques the “sloppy” appropriation of craft materials by fine artists who lack engagement with the material’s cultural history. ↩
9. Burisch, Making Otherwise. The concept of “historical material baggage” describes the constellation of skills, tools, expectations, and internalized rules that skilled makers carry in relation to their materials. ↩
10. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Bennett describes the capacity of things — food, metals, electrical grids — to act as “quasi agents” with trajectories of their own. ↩
11. Ursula Johnson, quoted in Burisch. Johnson’s practice draws on Mi’kmaq basket-weaving traditions taught by her great-grandmother Caroline Gould. The basket-weaving process is described as a dialogue in which “the wood manipulates the maker into understanding what it can do.” ↩
12. Janet Morton, Road Trip (2012), performance featuring Robert Kingsbury. The full-body wool suit unravels during a walk, with the wool thread becoming an active force that controls the movements of the wearer. ↩
13. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 151. ↩
14. “Intra-action” is Barad’s neologism, deliberately contrasted with “interaction.” Interaction presupposes pre-existing, independent entities that then encounter each other. Intra-action describes a process in which the entities themselves are produced through the encounter. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, Chapter 4. ↩
15. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. The compound term “ethico-onto-epistemology” insists that questions of value (ethics), reality (ontology), and knowledge (epistemology) are not separable. Every act of knowing is an act of being, and every act of being carries ethical responsibility. ↩
16. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. ↩
17. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges.” Haraway’s formulation: “Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges.” ↩
18. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Socialist Review 80 (1985); reprinted in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). ↩
19. Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2016). Hui defines cosmotechnics as “the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities.” ↩
20. Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021). The analysis of shanshui painting as a cosmotechnical practice is developed in Chapter 2, “Mountain and Water.” ↩
21. Yuk Hui, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics,” e-flux journal 86 (2017). Hui calls for the cultivation of “technodiversity” — different conceptions of technology through diverse forms of thinking and practice — as a counterweight to the homogenizing force of Western technological universalism. ↩
22. Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics, Chapter 3, “Art and Automation.” Hui argues that art functions as a resistance against “calculative rationality” by maintaining access to the incalculable — experiences and meanings that cannot be reduced to computation. ↩
23. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677), Part III, Proposition 6: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.” ↩
24. Editorial, Aion, drawing on Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976). Foucault’s reversal — “where there is power, there is resistance” — is extended to argue that resistance is not secondary to power but precedes it ontologically. ↩
25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (1991), trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). The philosopher as “creator of concepts” is contrasted with the “Sage” — the vertical, transcendental master of obedience — in favor of the “Friend” — the seeker of horizontal, democratic thought. ↩
26. On the non-neutrality of tokenization: different LLM tokenizers (GPT/tiktoken, Claude, Gemini, open-source models like Qwen and DeepSeek) fragment identical texts at different points. These differences reflect training data composition, language coverage priorities, and optimization choices — not linguistic structure. On the broader point that LLMs produce predictable rather than random outputs: Alexey Antonov (Data Science Team Lead, Kaspersky) tested 1,000 passwords generated by ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek and found that 87–88% could be cracked within an hour, because LLMs predict probable tokens rather than generating true randomness. See: Kaspersky Blog, “Strong Passwords in the Age of AI” (May 2025). The security firm Irregular found similar predictability patterns in password generation by Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini (February 2026). ↩
27. SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a text-based, XML-formatted vector graphics format whose filter system includes elements like feTurbulence (Perlin noise generation), feDisplacementMap (distortion through turbulence), feDiffuseLighting/feSpecularLighting (simulated light), and feColorMatrix (color manipulation). All filters are pure XML code. See: W3C SVG 2 Specification, w3.org/TR/SVG2/. ↩
28. On the permanence paradox of political art on blockchains: the same immutability that protects a work from censorship also permanently links it to a wallet address. If that address has been connected to a real identity (e.g., through KYC verification on an exchange), the connection is traceable — today, in ten years, in fifty years. In a changed political climate, the unchangeable work becomes unchangeable evidence. ↩
29. Burisch, Making Otherwise. “Material fluency” describes a highly skilled approach to materials that allows the maker to reapply or translate traditional skills into new contexts. The term emerged from the work of Marc Courtemanche. ↩
30. Minh-ha T. Pham, discussed in Burisch. Pham’s “inappropriate” discourse focuses on what cannot be appropriated or integrated into existing power structures — the inherent properties and historical weight of a material or a marginalized practice. ↩