Abstract The evolution of art from traditional material media to contemporary digital forms reveals historically specific interconnections among discourse, reproduction, and materiality. This study traces art as a historically situated cultural practice shaped by shifting technologies, ideologies, postmodern theory, and institutional conditions. Informed by a Foucauldian account of powerâknowledge, it examines how artistic meaning, visibility, cultural legitimacy, and value are organized within different historical formations. As digital technologies expand, blockchain and non-fungible tokens challenge established hierarchies by reconfiguring authenticity, originality, and ownership through mechanisms such as traceable provenance and artificial scarcity. At the same time, these developments are accompanied by new modalities of control, including platform infrastructures and algorithmic governance that influence circulation, attention, and valuation. The resulting tension between dematerialization and re-materialization highlights the ways digital art loosens its dependence on physical substrates while remaining embedded in technical, economic, and institutional arrangements. Overall, debates over the virtual and the actual, the copy and the original, continue to structure contemporary discussions of art and its changing conditions of production and value.
Abstract The accelerating dominance of non-human agents in digital infrastructures has created an existential imbalance between human intentionality and synthetic computation. All identity-centric and post-hoc verification paradigms have failed against advanced automation. This work introduces Proof of Being (PoB) â an ontological cryptographic primitive that binds digital agency to continuous, embodied human presence without revealing identity. Using Human Intention Semantic Proof Units (HISPU) â the fusion of physiological dynamics, semantic activity structure, and changing environmental context â we generate zero-knowledge proofs of authentic human engagement. From this substrate emerges the Vital Presence Token (VPT), a new energy-like digital asset that supplies âexistential energyâ exclusively to human-authorized agents. Ontological Digital Agents Management (ODAM) implements a biological-immune-system analogue: agents lacking fresh VPT undergo ontological death and cannot claim computational resources. The framework establishes verifiable human presence as the constitutional substrate for post-AGI digital civilization and defines the economic foundations of Web4. Keywords: proof of being, ontological cryptography, human presence verification, digital immune system, vital presence token, Web4, post-AGI governance, zero-knowledge biometrics, existential energy, digital agents management, human-in-the-loop, semantic intentionality, biological computing, HLA/MHC analogy, human sovereignty, scarcity, decentralized identity, ODAM, HISPU.
Digital fashion, a burgeoning intersection of digital media and the fashion industry, consists of 3D-modeled garments and accessories that are represented through digital environments such as metaverses, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and sold or authenticated using non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Unlike physical fashion, these digital items do not exist in conventional material form and are not designed for physical wear, shifting the pictorial representation of fashion from digital photography to computer-generated imagery (CGI). This paper critically examines discourses surrounding digital fashion and the perceptions of immateriality as well as common associations between technological advancement and political and social progress. These discourses are often framed by technological determinism, which positions the rise of digital worlds as inevitable, and presents innovation as a natural response to historical developments. The aim of this paper is to highlight the materiality of digital fashion which arises from the engagement between physical bodies and digital spaces. Furthermore, this process relies on physical infrastructures, from technological hardware and servers to the environmental impacts tied to its circulation and storage, and is further shaped by the software and platforms that enable its production and use. This study provides a framework to engage critically with digital fashionâs conceptual and material dimensions, offering insight into its evolving role in the larger discourse on technology and culture as virtual spaces continue to expand.
Abstract Drawing on anthropological perspectives, this paper argues that the fungibility of objects and the ability to exchange them for money is a defining characteristic of capitalist markets. In contrast, other systems of reckoning value emphasize the unique relationships within which objects are embedded and their inability to stand for just any other thing. This paper further highlights the role of slavery in the origins and continued dominance of capitalism and the existence of alternative systems such as cooperativism and sharing that are often overlooked. This paper then examines the Saussurean and Peircean semiotics underlying the concept of money as an abstract sign and argues that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in blockchain technology contradict these theories by emphasizing pure uniqueness and rendering objects non-transformable or inconvertible. This paper concludes by warning against the dangers of a future where fungibility is absent, as it is necessary for life and the generation of new and different possibilities.
The thesis aims to identify the potential use of a cryptocurrency in the international trade and the level of fulfillment of that potential. First of all, the thesis describes how cryptocurrencies work. In the second part, the potential of a cryptocurrency is investigated. In the third part, the market of the most used cryptocurrency - Bitcoin is analyzed. The thesis finds out to what extent Bitcoin is used nowadays and whether bitcoin as a cryptocurrency fulfills its potential.
reason and factual subjects, and reality-the latter two terms now taking on a specifically modernist charge. Put otherwise, the trend leading from symbolism to modernism was to confer upon highly particularized signifiers ever more limited access to transcendental signifieds; modernism, in parallel with something like Benjamin's notion of allegory, turns into a thematic difficulty that very access to latent meanings which symbolism took for granted. But This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 07:10:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 76 Poetics Today 12:1 postmodernism deranges the entire symbolist-modernist economy. In complicity with a work like Derrida's Of Grammatology, postmodernism ascribes a sort of transcendental energy to the play of signifiers themselves. And if, for modernism, utopian hopes are spawned by the conflict between word and thing, postmodernism bases the idea of Utopia on a strange new materiality resident in words themselves. The foregoing may seem to contradict my own earlier remarks relating modernism to Habermassian (noncoercive) consensus and postmodernism to Lyotardian (antiterroristic) dissent. But I believe this objection to be superficial. If the modernist project, in order to avoid an empty or idea of Utopia, preserves an Enlightenment separation between words and things, this does not diminish but rather increases the importance of consensus. Consensus, after all, provides a corrective to empty or, worse, terroristic ideas: the larger the community of language users that agrees on a certain way of relating representations to the world, the more likely, at least for that particular community, that other relations between words and things will prove subjective or empty or terroristic. The gap between reference and referent, in fact, drives the dynamic by which consensus forms, then breaks apart, then forms again in seriatim, as evidence against a given representational scheme (local representations it cannot account for) begins to outweigh evidence for that scheme (local representations it can account for). Likewise, if postmodernism, as opposed to modernism, abolishes the gap between reference and referent, and instead invests itself with a sort of material density that is the stuff of Utopia, this in no way implies that dissent is impossible or unimportant. To the contrary, dissent becomes at once present reality and anticipation of the future. Since the postmodernist can no longer appeal to material referents in arbitrating competing representations, such arbitration of competing views itself provides the only grounds for knowledge and for hope. The alternative to dissent is in fact inertia, and death. The materiality that postmodernism confers upon our views themselves suggests that, unless we continually examine and reshape those views, hope will be dissipated in that same hall of mirrors in which reality as such gives way to an infinite montage of simulacra. In the space remaining, I cannot hope to confirm this general model for understanding modernism and postmodernism. This would require nothing less than an extended survey of a significant percentage of the literature grouped under both these categories. Such an undertaking clearly would amount to a book-length study, at the least. However, I believe that I have succeeded in adumbrating broader cultural or conceptual linkages and connections that help account for the undecidability of the modernism/postmodernism debate-as it is This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 07:10:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Herman Modernism/Postmodernism currently waged. This debate is undecidable precisely because, despite the deceptive appearance of common assumptions, the debaters define in different ways such crucial terms as representation and progress. Supporters of cultural modernism, given their presuppositions about words and things, cannot help but base their utopian aspirations on consensus. Conversely, supporters of postmodernism, given their assumptions about the materiality of representations, cannot help but invest sheer disagreement with a sort of exhilarating, even transcendental, energy. We cannot hope to bring to a peaceable end a discussion in which the participants think they share a single vocabulary, but actually do not. We can merely stake out the grounds for conflict. In what follows, I shall focus on Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Herr's Dispatches (1978) in order to make, in the context of literature itself, some first, rough indications of the subtle shifts in vocabulary that I have described in the context of theory. I do not mean to suggest that these indications amount to proof for my overall argument; I offer them merely to make that argument seem perhaps slightly less abstract.