Capital Compression

As the wind deposits dust, and dirt settles into soil, the landscape forms. The amassment of dirt and specks transfers pressure upon pressure, upon pressure. What erodes elsewhere, gathers here. Until carbon turns to diamond, and compression into capital.

Capital Compression explores the poetics of blockchain technology – photographically and discursively. The publication employs and tests strategies of authentication and documentation. A hashed poem, a series of twenty photographs, and an essay intertwine. Each appropriates aspects of blockchain: its functioning, appeal and semiotics.

A poem, consisting of nineteen lines, deals with blockchain technology as a means of documentation. It appropriates the vocabulary used to describe the technology and experiments with discursive and rhetorical techniques for establishing authenticity.

The poem employs a system of hashing, analogous to blockchain technology. With every new line, it also encrypts the poem as it is found on the previous page, turning that preceding version into a 64-digit line of code by using the SHA-256 algorithm. The history, progression and sequence of the poem thus become immutable. The 64 digits on the last page can be considered an unfalsifiable and complete poetic document.

The sequence of twenty photographs was taken near Seef, Bahrain on the artificial Nurana Islands.

Published by Roma Publications, designed by Tjobo Kho, part of Documenting Objects, a research project at KASK & Conservatory, School of Arts Gent.