Love on the Block

An article on the practice of crypto-weddings and other performed rituals around love, sovereignty and nationalism using crypto-currencies and decentralised ledger technologies. Part of a larger publication featuring a wide selection of leading contributors to the emergent field of blockchain technology and the arts.

Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain is the first book of its kind, intersecting artistic, speculative, conceptual, and technical engagements with the technology heralded as “the new internet”. The book features a range of newly commissioned essays, fictions, illustration and art documentation exploring what the blockchain might mean for our collective futures.

Imagined as a future-artefact from a time before the blockchain changed the world, and a protocol by which a community of thinkers can transform what that future might be, Artists Re:Thinking The Blockchain acts as a gathering and focusing of contemporary ideas surrounding this still largely mythical and wildly hyped technology.

The book comprises: Documentation of artistic projects engaged in the blockchain, including foundational works Plantoid, Terra0, and Bittercoin; Theorisation of key areas in the global blockchain conversation by writers such as Hito Steyerl, Rachel O’Dwyer, Rob Myers, Ben Vickers and Holly Herndon; and new poetry, illustration and speculative fiction by Theodorios Chiotis, Cecilia Wee, Juhee Hahm and many more.

Threaded throughout the book is Finbook a web-based project in partnership with Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Finbook is an interface where readers and bots can trade on the value of chapters included in the book, rendering the book with an Internet-of-Things like interactivity, and imagining a new regime for cultural value under blockchain conditions.