Arnout and Michiel De Cleene – Capital Compression

Capital Compression explores the poetics of blockchain. On a semiotic level, a blockchain is self-referential. It is a document documenting itself. This publication employs strategies of authentication and documentation, both photographically and discursively. A nineteen-line poem mimics blockchain technology by employing a system of hashing, encrypting the poem with each successive line and page. The history, progression, and sequence of the poem in this way becomes immutable. The poem intertwines with a series of photographs and an essay entitled 'The Glow'. What erodes elsewhere, gathers here. Until carbon turns into diamond, and compression into capital.

24 pages, 15 x 22 cm, softcover, Roma Publications (Amsterdam).