The eighth of twelve posts taking Woodstock, blockchain and a 1960’s conceptual art on knots to the Third Web, and beyond.
The White Paper
Creating a prime example
There are blaring inadequacies in any goal set on securing confidentiality in blockchain when its public good is broadly recognized as the ability to autonomously ascribe reputations to actions and objects by making their value unencumbered by doubt. The significance in reducing my art of the knot to a White Paper for conceptualizing this premise as a system made of interpretable features of immutable knots to build a platform that perpetuates both the actual and virtual transaction of their value is what this post is about.
Knots are used to illustrate an ideal concept of trust for good reason. They propose something that can demonstrate blockchain in the position of being a core mechanism. Blockchain keeps order in my systemic probes into endlessly creating knots, and follows the discovery of each knot in a base that promises a way for me to continue generating their unique graphic properties forever, as an autonomously functioning Internet art.
A White Paper is a statement of the intention to put something to use. In this case, that is blockchain. As previously explained, this is in the context of a conceptual art that has already been worked out for some fifty years now. The web site that provides this statement is full of all the things an artist gets involved in when zeroing in on a way to make such a longstanding idea functional. The work you are reading here, written specifically for Medium, is for sending the reader to a web site to be involved in a White Paper that is about a function of blockchain within this art.
This web site at http://www.greatknot.com is laden with visuals covering all aspects of the concept. It developed as an immersion; as ways to illustrate an approach to the virtual assets that explain and bring meaning to the art; into the physically factual sense of perceptible things. The site opens with several pages about knots as individually separate vector identities performing actions common to what random number generators bring to cryptography in the normal operation of blockchain.
The specifics of that idea here, however, associates blockchain with a systemic approach more oriented toward a platform built of a descriptive geometry functioning as cryptography. What is assumed is this is easier to grasp than the way blockchain is commonly presented. That is what was lacking twenty years ago when the idea left traditional art, and I adapted the generation of knots to a presence on computational display devices that these vector graphic images displayed as descriptive geometry. This was the first switch of the creative process away from unresolved and hypothetical extensions of drafting methods that this art had been stuck in since the late 1960s.
In a very similar way to how Cryptography and Game Theory found themselves moving from obscure academic studies into Bitcoin and then blockchain; for using their surrogates and incentives; this virtual presence as vector compositions, with blockchain’s arrival, has leaped in concept from stand-alone computer single artwork in a wallet-like memory media, as thumb drive art, to the purely digital form now practical as a distributed registry using blockchain(ish) technology.
Building the base
Over the past decade all the original knots composed in vector formats have been converted to the JPEGs and GIFs common to the Web2.0 Internet. This removed the art from being localized in physical media by making it just like any other digital picture, preparing it for image recognition technology. Knots then found themselves on a parallel course with the physical Woodstock’94 tag experiment in a conceptual art logic being worked out around the logic of the Great Knot’s fit into the Internet. The bulk of the material in the web site is this content of an information-Internet. The Internet was not ready yet for tokens that are authentic as unique vector-based geometric entities.
The argument I’d brought to art is that, in the context of cryptospace, the raster picture is a notion of virtual reality, and not the actual thing of the Great Knot. A JPEG may supply information, but not trustless information like the plan a knot can be built from. In an Internet platform developed under blockchain protocol a destination where a graphical knot is found must initiate a raster image of vector content.
For the Internet that is redundant in something that is already digital. Thus, my White Paper proposes a platform that presents knots as works within a mechanism that has evolved around aspects of html-5 scalable vector graphics (SVG), that can make this art’s storage in an achieve function as a purely autonomous collection of geometric components in a Third Web technology of Things.
This twist is the essence of what the White Paper brings to blockchain space. The art exists to build the specifications for a new view of what an Internet ecosystem looks like in a Third Web activity. It requires everything be designed into an interactive system and various levels of observers and actors be drawn into even deeper dives, and absorb them into even more experience with autonomous systems than in Web2.0. It is showing an engine for perpetually generating new, unique knots forever.
The process for achieving this was initiated with a particular graphical tool-set made for designing forms specifically recognizable as interweaves. The proposed platform operations are based on having a matrix foundation formed for designing circuits as the core of a stack that conforms to a blockchain protocol for building its self-referential sequence of blocks.
The protocol is confirming the immutable individuality of these circuits in a sequence that guarantees difference, one knot from the other. That difference is between the present and the previous and this truth-test steadily drives the sequence toward gains in complexity. The way the stack is organized into blockchain-maintained registries, built layer by layer from newly authenticated geometric instances, never varies from the overall substructure of the matrix that guides their compositions.
Systemic phenomenology
This is all treated in the detailed illustrations of the White Paper as a systemic phenomenology. It’s built out from origins in the “genesis sequence” illustrated in the animation shown here. It comprises an origin of all knowledge for the platform. Embedded in this sequence is a fundamental system, displayed as the thousands of knots composed to show this system in operation. This is the Genesis Allocation that sets up the way that one single provenance record orders all subsequent knots that the system builds, and will continuously build forever.
Included in the White Paper’s process of initiation of the blockchain is a vector geometry that fully describes the matrix’s function. This is the clear vector-developed animation shown with the title of this segment; every line used to form the pattern drafted one by one as it goes through the evolution of plotting the geometry. The descriptive captions capture this in language. This is all then adapted as a completed structure to the form of modules, tiles, and repeats to demonstrate the matrix being applied to build knots.
This descriptive geometry goes back to the late 1960s. Only in the twenty-first century context, with blockchain protocol, is a registry potential brought to the White Paper, and the html-5 protocol allowed to make this matrix and instance layers what unique knots are built of. The layers form the core paradigm that all individually unique elements of the art use to share this common vector formula to make the infinite stack of all the knots that have ever been made.
The blockchain’s purpose in this is to read this stack from its core, carrying each knot’s genesis information for all eternity. The repeated instances of the matrix are the scaffold for this information, built out in a modular pattern, from a structure that records the complex relationships between each knot. A serialized modular numbering system is the part of this framework that tracks the location of each digital asset as a formal verification process. In addition to identifying the coordinates in the vector code that prove the uniqueness of a place in the progression of the matrix’s systemic geometry, the numbers also guarantee a one-of-a-kind serialized unit of exchange for the protocol: Cryptoknot.
A game any child can play
Since its origins as a systemic art, and continuing over the past 50-plus years, the premise, when dealing with knots, has always been that they manifest this potential of being able to be made forever, without any one ever duplicating another. Blockchain has finally arrived to keep track of the trail of provenance required to make this so, and this process of using this vector coding for the way blocks, at a blockchain’s scale, handle the storage and search demand for controlling this infinite number of objects, by making accepted elements of its architecture into incentive rewards, completes the White Paper’s concept.
Adding Cryptoknot to the system brings it an artifact with functionality, from its modular format. In the incentive structure of blockchain, working to earn Cryptoknot is the metaphorical parity used here to the public key.
As the White Paper sketches out the basic operation of a platform, a user is introduced to a game, devised to create an open source operation for adding to the stack that is rewarded with Cryptoknots for uses in and out of the platform’s operations.
The benefit of interaction in the data development for knots, is that a user gets to know blockchain tech in a format legible to everyone in the world. Simply snapping nine repeatable vector instances into their matching geometry on a matrix-patterned puzzle board, as a trial and error completion to find a solution to adding a knot to the sequence is a game any child can play.
This White Paper brings many subjects of contemporary concern together in ways that can be illustrated by knots. No matter how simplistic this may seem, the properties that this will go on to show from what all knots have been found to have in the Alpha stage of this platform’s development are clearly exponents of systems theory that easily fit into functions for distribution and use of cryptocurrency. The White Paper’s invention that simultaneously marks locations in a distributed ledger as it places a unique knot, newly formed, into it, illustrates that every module created in tandem with a unique knot, on the matrix, confirms the structure of this distributed ledger. Through this process of inclusive generation, blockchain protocol guarantees the knot form is also immutable, and one-of-a-kind block locations can function in ways the common virtual cryptocurrency’s exchange metrics cannot.
That dive into cryptospace teases out the ancillary role the White Paper twists the properties of knots into. As it guides the infinite amount of systemic processing a vector world makes possible while making knots, it also makes it easy to prove that an identity recorded on a blockchain is embodied in the knot’s geometric way of locating it, and that gives Cryptoknot its value.
The tallying of modules that define Cryptoknot can bring the consensus of autonomous nodes used for authentication of new knots to the distributed ledger in numbers in the millions. The process of building knots continuously, far into the future, and even on forever, can also manage an economy. As everything is developed to work toward this end, it is well worth the challenge of reading further.