The emergence of the blockchain birthed the potential of a fully developed Internet. Every connection made through it is a transactional function on a decentralized ledger that makes distribution and likelihood of a consensus on use, so integral to this Systemic Art, look ever closer to trending toward a practical outcome.

Since the emergence of the Internet, its Graphic User Interface has been expected somehow to generate interactivity useful to the art's processes. Now that, combined with the rapid acceptance of blockchain for recording transactions, presents a possibility of the whole world participating in this Conceptual Art's unending discovery of new knots, capable of autonomously performing processes and potentially supplying the means for this go on forever.

This web page is stating the purpose for what is intended by setting that in motion.

This purpose is summed up by just citing the rarity of the art's output relative to a concept of value in which individual one-of-a-kind subjects of entries into a registry are added to the order of growth in a sequence where, under the umbrella of simply making an effort, something of trusted value is created.

A systemic that alludes to this by applying cryptoknot as a description on this web site's home page puts a hierarchical role of a specie into its relationship with that value. This reference to an interaction that's like Bitcoin's registry on blockchain has been in knot generation far longer than cryptocurrency's spawning of a specie-like connection over the Internet. Though seemingly contrasting with its self-referencing fully internalized art identity, this with value signals a grounding in strength of usefulness.

So knots are presented to the Internet in an enterprise where an open-source process will continue its building of a concept of value, and continue that autonomously into the future. Learning what it means to be involved with it now is an investment that will be very rewarding once its value system is broadly recognized.
a game of knots
In what was originally planned, this is designed to function in the same way mining does in the Bitcoin protocol. In this case, though, a specific request would be made for the next knot in a registry everyone would have in their computer that were all built from having matched puzzle pieces for positions on a game board that go together to form a closed, interlaced ribbon pattern. A number code to a modular-based number sequence where the next knot to be added to what matches its generative logic is broadcast and a competition ensues.

Everyone has the complete sequence on their computer and everyone has the ability to submit a solution to the quest. The top ten time-stamped correct responses are accepted by consensus of the first one hundred to judge them as correct solutions. The identity of the earliest time-stamp response is entered in that solution's block of the blockchain as the owner of that knot. The remaining nine have the numbered modules identified with that knot divided among them in this knot's block.

These ten collaborate and submit the next knot to be requested and when that is recognized as correct by one hundred responses this is released for solutions.

This entire process is autonomous, automated within the distributed ledger in protocols that govern the registry. A program initiated when the genesis block initiated the blockchain is its source.

This process begins with an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) where the coin is a numbered module created by the program as each addition to the knot sequence is placed in the registry. In the process of adding knots, exchanges of these numbers as specie are also approved by the participants approving the addition to the blockchain registry.

The system is designed to be in perpetual motion. In an opposite fashion to Bitcoin that uses up a limited number of hashcodes to guarantee that rarity stabilizes value, cryptoknots would be applying a concept that gives an artwork a denomination that identifies a serialized specie as its fiat value. The structure of the art brings certainty to trust along with this value of its specie identity to a transaction.
reality check
There are two pressing concerns this early plan for cryptoknots was addressing. One looked to a broad involvement in blockchain applications and assumed a future where the example of generating crypto tokens builds the creative side of knowledge into an acceptable way for them as a specie to apply the natural competitive juices to. It looked forward to a future where everyone in this growing world of Internet connections competes for either having their own knot or for being spiritually attached to everyone that shares that goal with them.

However, an ever increasing acceptance and trust in the virtual is what this concept is most intent on having an impact on, and the context in which a conceptual art is analogous to the existence of value in a world of finite things, in retrospect, would be almost impossible to organize. Cryptoknots validate a knowledge that's infinitely different analytically from ideas that have power as analogs to all art that is rare, and legitimizing a context for value in anything worthy of examining and emulating through that context exposes everything else in the process as just a decorative allusion to uniqueness.

But the thought experiment was well worth examining. Reach the awareness that each cryptoknot has a series of identifiers for its particular knot that their metadata records as commonly recognized number schemes in a registry may have made obvious the system's limitations but it defined all its attributes.

Each knot is defined by a knot-lock number, its grid key's infra number range, and the number of greater Gordian blocks needed for the infra number range to key the knot-lock number.

The knot-lock number is a topological identifier. It is a count of the shapes keyed into the grid that trace the path that makes the closed circuit of the knot.

An infra number range is the progressive numbers that designate the grid tile elements (Infras) upon which a knot is structured. This is the identity used for token distribution.

The greater Gordian blocks are the simplest grouping of shape units that key repeatedly when building out the knot grid. This is the element of the system that signals its transition point into incomprehensibility. It is at the Gordian block extreme where it is no longer possible to trust a consensus of autonomous human decisions to verify a new knot to be graphically added to the registry. Gordian blocks can go on interlocking with themselves, growing the grid, forever, and knot creation can be extended on them into the imagination of machines, so the concept need not end... but all useful creation of knots in a community of human consensus does end at this point, requiring a consensus for a forth protocol of machine conventions. When this point is reached, the Infra number range for it will be the cryptographic key to what all these knots assembled together mean, and what informs this decision.

digital token developments, 2018

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Spoiler Alert! All that has been learned in this thought experiment is going to make it easier to apply Artificial Intelligence to the role that had been planned for a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). the value of art

For now, let's just focus on the interpretive side of the illusionary symbolism that is currency. This can have the aesthetic of the coin or the certificate and still carry an individual message as art. It is this that is "minted" for the imagination, and demonstrated in the symbolic references to cryptoknots spread out over these pages.

Currency, and even cryptocurrency with its uniquely traceable character as accessioned by value, are still allusions to the concept of specie. The closest digital parallel to this allusive context are the images on this Internet site. Like all the sides and surfaces of The Eternal Object geometry in this .gif animation,

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Eternal Object; design, 1972 (animation, 2012)

Eternal Object; design, 1972 (artist with maquettes, 2016/17)


6(red); 10(blue): 1998

Enantiomorphic Pair, Serigraph 1982

Rope 22, 1968

ErinAnna's Knot, 2015

they are in really just digital code; an illusion. No illusion's existence can be legitimated. Similarly, only with awareness of the context of their creation can the images of this page be trusted to exist.

The art can be a physical reference to the knot's idea, exploring the unimaginable dimensions only the knot represents in its descriptiveness as a virtual construction worked out in maquettes to resolve the ways this can become a monumental geometric sculpture. Or, using recognizable media canonical in traditional art objects, it can be the theme of unique creations that take the form of paintings or prints.

In the context of the cryptoknot, plans for knots represent what can be made to exist. That context is making the concept that the variety of unique objects created in the form of a particular knot is demonstrating what's unimaginably vast in the number of unique knots there are in all existence.

This art naturally extends to the possibility that every knot plan is a knot form. What is produced will always be both a new object and an awareness of the creative experience of conceptualizing it. The experience can be realized in just the knotting of a rope or length of ball chain, or in constructing a monumental earthwork.

The Great Knot Project demonstrates an example of what extremes this can be taken to. As Land Art it makes the knot a pattern visible on virtual globe viewers and as a Site Specific Artwork it represents the greater story that opens in the SITE ASPECT division of this website that takes in everything from the history of the geographic region it is in to how it all guides the future direction of Artificial Intelligence.
The Great Knot (above) is a 3/4 acre-large 3 crossing knot built (below) as scale and orientation to global coordinates for structuring virtual land art knotforms.

In the end, it is within the context of the Great Knot that associating this with Artificial Intelligence to describe how this all came about being where it is as a Real World Asset forms the knot's allusion to absolute positioning to give it its ontological bearings. But it is allusions in that to history, time and space that will undoubtedly remain functional even if the producer of what's digital does not. An allusion to a semantic architecture is, in an Internet, tied to classical structures that are themselves formed from individual thought.

Click on animation to open parent web site greatknot.com in new browser window