STARS AND STONE

Decentralised network structures have always held commonality with the stars. The aesthetics of them, down to the first instance of their imaginary—Paul Baran’s landmark memo On Distributed Systems (1964)—draws close comparison to many early celestial charts carved into stone, ivory, and then printed nearly a millennia earlier.

The physical immutability of these early charts, and their subsequent distribution via a novel technology known as printing, gives us space to reflect on the philosophical relationship between blockchains, alongside technology more broadly, and the stars.

Before modern timekeeping, star charts functioned as decentralised temporal systems, shared references that allowed civilisations to align activity without central coordination. They functioned as our earliest clocks. It is in the sun’s rise and fall that we see the first distinctions between the concepts of absolute versus relative time. The sun always rises (absolute) but never at the same time for the same two people (relative).

Stasis Fields (2025), a science fiction term for a space where time stands still, explores these questions through the use of historic monetary blueprint ‘charts’ and the aesthetics of black holes—a place where time itself breaks down.

It is in this space: between Bitcoin’s reordering of our concept of time, science fiction’s equal concerns with both cyberspace and space travel, and black holes as sites to discuss the competing philosophies of time that blockchains throw up, that the inspiration for these works can be found.

The works ‘rewire’ historic monetary blueprints into speculative cosmologies, asking questions about the aesthetics of centralisation and decentralisation. The discreet mechanical blueprint is rewired into a Lernaean Hydra. In this new paradigm, no system collapses in the rewiring of these ‘blueprints’. It just morphs. There is no head to cut off.

TIMECHAINS NOT BLOCKCHAINS

When Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin, they originally referred to its foundational structure not as a “blockchain” but as a “timechain”. This was more than a technical label; it was a subtle invocation of the deep interlink between time and truth. This term appeared in the early versions of the Bitcoin code, where Satoshi emphasised the chronological ordering of blocks, and time stamping bears the most references in the white paper. As many people have described it, blockchains tick. But how?

In particular, the blockchain responds to the dilemma faced by both Einstein and Poincaré: how to reconcile the mechanical sequencing of events with the relativistic dispersal of time across networks. While Einstein approached this as a theoretical physicist, constructing a unified spacetime where simultaneity dissolves, Poincaré tackled the same issue from a logistical stance, seeking to synchronise time across imperial systems and geographies.

The challenge in both views lies in the impossibility of establishing an absolute temporal reference in a distributed system.

Blockchain, through proof-of-work, achieves what neither geometry nor relativistic physics could: a practical instantiation of succession—arithmetical, not spatial—that does not rely on any central authority or privileged perspective.

In doing so, blockchain technology does not follow Einstein’s relativistic framework—it subverts it. So is time a straight line (absolute), or does it bend and stretch due to gravity (relativistic)?

For blockchains, time unfolds in two ways. On one hand, there is the past, where the chain is linear, absolute and successive, philosophically challenging Einstein’s concept of relative space-time and restoring a Kantian notion of absolute artificial time. And yet, if we were to use the proof-of-work chain tip as analogous to the present, notions of time become probabilistic and unstable. Viewed from a distance, time seems to stop at the event horizon, much like the chain tip. Once an object crosses the event horizon, it cannot return. As it speeds towards the infinity of the singularity, an irreversible arrow of time is developed, breaking down Einstein’s equations and destabilising again the idea of space-time back into the realm of the unknown.

This resolution has deep implications. Where Kant imagined space and time as necessary forms imposed by the mind, and post-Kantian thinkers sought to dissolve or relativise these categories, blockchain reintroduces the possibility of an objective temporal structure. It does this not through metaphysics but through code.

The temporal ordering of blocks, validated through proof-of-work, creates an irreversible sequence—an engineered form of absolute time. It bypasses the relativistic dissolution of simultaneity by establishing a consensus mechanism that renders time concrete, not abstract.

THE UNIVERSAL LIBRARY

A through-line across all of Alice’s work to date is the idea of text as both the current and currency of the blockchains, and the digital artwork that sits on top of them. As they wrote in their introduction to On NFTs: “Throughout the history of art, artists and writers, image and text have always been partners, mixing both fluently and violently together in a continual symbiotic dance, where images provoke text and those texts provoke more images, and the dance carries on. To hijack Walter Benjamin’s words, that is the storm that we call art-historical progress. And yet on the blockchain, this call and response between image and text has become supercharged. An image does not exist on the blockchain without text. Whether it is a code-based on-chain work, or a hyperlink to a decentralised file server, text is the current and currency that creates and secures NFTs. One has to look no further than Larva Labs’ Autoglyphs (2019) to understand that when stripped to its bones, NFTs are just text.”

Blockchains are also deeply intertwined with the history of publishing, for what is a blockchain if not humanity’s latest breakthrough in the art of the written record? Indeed, blockchains have reemphasised the importance of publishing as a communal act within contemporary culture, drawing attention again to its social and political role in cultural debate and free speech. It is this dance, between the importance of text to NFTs and the disruption of blockchain to publishing, that has been the guiding inspiration and philosophical backdrop to the words found in these pages.

Stasis Fields continues Alice’s engagement in the idea of the blockchain as an infinite archive—the world’s first truly universal library, to take the term from Kurd Lasswitz. Following on from their first exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris, which centred around Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Library of Babel (1944), Alice has assembled a large library of texts ranging from Dante’s Inferno to poetry by Keats and T.S. Eliot, through to science fiction by Wells and Le Guin. All meditations on the concept of time, the texts and their fragmented glyphs that fill the black hole are the ‘information’ that crosses the event horizon of each black hole.

This library stretches across titles drawn from fictional galaxies and mythological realms, from Douglas Adams’ Magrathea to Dante’s Acheron, the river that ferries souls to the afterlife. Yet it is in the work Charon (2025)—named after the ferryman who guides the dead across Acheron—that we find the clearest expression of the intersection between absolute time and the rituals of currency. Charon, after all, required a single coin placed in the mouth of each soul—a token of passage, a proof of value. It is no surprise, then, that Dante’s Inferno closes not in despair, but in orientation and its relationship with time: “And we came out to see once more the stars.”

— Marlene Corbun