Ian Margo: d/wb project Abstraction, Mediation, and the Spiral of Technoculture
The next Solo Release curated by Fakewhale presents d/wb, a project by Ian Margo that unfolds as an inquiry into the interwoven domains of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, semiotics, and technological mediation.
Developed across Madrid, London, and San Francisco, the project resists reduction to a single category. It operates simultaneously as digital artwork, philosophical speculation, and experimental semiotics.
At its foundation, d/wb is a cycle of three video works: The Wet Box, Third Extension, and Fieldware, together articulating a spiral of abstraction.
Each work explores how signs are generated, abstracted, and activated as vectors of language, value, and perception. The trajectory moves from liquidity, to recursion, to distributed field, reframing abstraction not as simplification but as an operative force that sustains technocultural imaginaries and contemporary economies.
The cycle also manifests through precise technical construction.
The Wet Box (10:10 min, 4K, single-channel) draws on generative AI, text, and sound manipulation to stage the liquid condition of the sign. Built from noise and low-resolution fragments, it performs abstraction as a cybernetic gesture that unsettles cognition and reconfigures language.
Third Extension (8:42 min, 4K, single-channel with the possibility of three-channel expansion) layers images and text boxes to artificialize the face, enacting recursive processes of encoding and resignification.
Fieldware (11:00 min, 4K, single-channel with the capacity for fifteen auxiliary channels) reaches the widest expansion. Up to sixteen parallel streams operate as extensions of the main video, dispersing image and sound into an immersive environment. Developed in collaboration with Alexandre Montserrat, its sonic design intensifies a fractured rhythm where continuity gives way to collapse and resonance.
Through this framework, d/wb positions video, sound, and generative systems as active forces of mediation. What emerges is a framework in which signs are not stable objects but dynamic processes that reorganize value, subjectivity, and collective perception.
By activating both conceptual speculation and material experimentation, Margo situates his practice at the intersection of artistic production and technocultural critique.
To expand on these foundations, we engaged Ian Margo in a series of questions that position d/wb within a deeper Dialog Flow, tracing the conceptual and technical dimensions that shape his work.
Fakewhale: Your practice moves fluidly between research, writing, design, and digital production. When you think about your trajectory so far, how do these different domains come together in shaping your language as an artist?
Ian Margo: I believe that artistic production is intrinsically bound to research, so much so that both practices become inseparable disciplines. For me, artistic production is a field of action. As Vilém Flusser suggests, an action, an activation, is always a modification of substances. In this sense, my practice operates through aesthetics, understood as the study of what is perceptible. Thus, the artistic process becomes an act of activating and experimenting with the medium itself, with the aim of recoding formats and exploring what becomes possible when reality is mediated and made accessible through the senses.
Over the past year, my research has led me to delve into various theories of language, stemming from an initial interest in technology and digital as well as cybernetic media. My proposal is, above all, a pursuit of honesty toward the medium: an effort to recognize its limits while also exploring those limits as material for the development of artistic discourse.
My work does not operate on separate layers—research, design, and production are not distinct stages but rather interconnected dimensions. Each contributes material from which the work is built. These materials are both technical and conceptual—a distinction that is increasingly difficult to maintain, since in both cases a similar act of activation is required.
Ultimately, my interest lies in experience itself, for it is within experience that the boundaries of the possible are reconfigured. I seek to construct a landscape that is beautiful and sincere, one that extends the geometries of the processes that constitute it, that expands the frame—the context—and that continuously questions discourse in order to generate something new. I aim to generate movement among my materials—divergent, even distorted directionalities; a translucent unfolding; an opening to what lies within (or without, which is the same). My practice is grounded in the principle of mediation: words can only say what their own properties lay bare.
Fakewhale: In The Wet Box abstraction acts less as reduction and more as a generative force that unsettles cognition and value. What drew you toward treating abstraction in this operative sense, and what possibilities do you see it opening within contemporary technoculture?
Ian Margo: Abstraction functions as the central thread throughout The Wet Box and, more broadly, across the entire project, including its other constituent works. In this particular piece, abstraction initially operates in a more traditional sense, shaping the media and representations that unfold across the video. Yet I conceive of abstraction not merely as reduction or simplification but as a productive process: within a recursive system of mediation (of representation), it becomes impossible to identify an origin point, a privileged axis of departure. Since discourse here is necessarily linear, we might say that we begin with something given—the datum (axis 1)—which is mediated (axis 2) by something that has the capacity to activate it through further mediation (axis 3). Crucially, there can be no axis 2 without axis 3, and vice versa. Once both operate upon axis 1, the datum is activated, and a series of values are generated. This recursive process is reconciled and framed as a process of abstraction, which arises precisely through the arrangement of these elements in such a way that value emerges. This, I propose, is what constitutes the format.
This technical logic is present both discursively and formally in The Wet Box, where abstract movement and repetition are organized within an environment of openness and noise, and set in dialogue with a text that not only addresses these very issues but also, through its contextualization, produces an aesthetic experience—representational, mediational, and value-generating—by relocating the generality of the text into an abstract framework. In this way, The Wet Box enacts abstraction as process, simultaneously interrogating both content and frame, while working directly with the production of value through language, image, and movement.
Regarding the operativity of this process in the context of contemporary digital culture, I argue that digital media possess a unique capacity to question format and to operate as scales of movement and transformation. The digital format allows one to approach the limit of representation—not to fix oneself at this limit (since it is never stable, and the closer one approaches, the further it recedes)—but rather to inhabit its immediacy of mobility. This mobility enables the continuous reconfiguration of format and accelerates the processes by which language and value are produced.
Fakewhale: With Third Extension the face becomes a site where language and technology recursively reconfigure meaning. Can you expand on how this artificialization of the face speaks to the politics of representation in today’s networked environments?
Ian Margo: Third Extension, as a continuation of The Wet Box and part of the same project, continues to explore recursive processes of producing value and meaning through the application of multiple layers of directionality and geometry. In this work, particular emphasis is placed on the frame, the edge, the border—the threshold of representation, or of what can be mediated. This threshold interests me not for the need to cross it, but for its discursive potential when activated in relation to other forms of limits. In Third Extension, the most immediate frame is the video itself, bound to the 16:9 format yet open to immersion in spaces that resignify it. Indeed, beyond its most obvious boundary, the piece has the potential to operate as a multichannel installation, producing meaning by exceeding its conventional frame.
The work, however, does not stop there. Third Extension sets forth multiple forms of limit: in its text boxes, several of which are placed in close proximity on the image surface and thus engage in dialogue; and in the rhythms and internal partitions that structure the duration of the video, offering experimental configurations of movement. Movement emerges within a frame that encloses a tongue-twister, itself framed within another, which in turn dialogues with a continuous frame showing multiple videos in relation to each other, all of which are crossed by yet another frame where additional text appears. The connective thread across this dance of limits and frames is the arrangement of elements itself—what I have elsewhere described in relation to The Wet Box as the site of production and as the very reason why experimenting with format is vital.
This arrangement functions as an abstract machine, or in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, as a “face” (the white wall/black hole complex). As in The Wet Box, it produces value and meaning through processes of abstraction.
In Third Extension, rather than politics of representation, I speak of economies of representation. The arrangement—the ordering—of elements, and the centrality of the frame (oikos), inevitably recall the etymology of economy itself. But again, the matter does not end here: Third Extension acknowledges that these economic processes emerge as the product of systems of representation, or mediation. The relation between two orders generates an intersection, a directionality or play of directionalities. Each produces value, and in doing so, grants meaning to any ordering of elements, generating discourse through opposition.
Here, the “face” is traversed and activated, once more through the use of format and the geometric and mobile capacities of the digital medium, which expand the possibilities of value and discourse production. Third Extension extends the frame itself, treating it as a play of potentialities, as movements within flows of meaning and signification—like one who gazes upon an object before them, apprehends its name, and reconstructs a map of its characteristics.
Fakewhale: Fieldware disperses signification into a fractured field of image and sound. Rather than continuity, it emphasizes interruption and resonance. How does this fractured rhythm reflect your thinking about value, distribution, and the infrastructures of Web3?
Ian Margo: As I introduced in relation to Third Extension, language and processes of mediation emerge from the potential disposition of different elements—differences that, in these arrangements, appear “indifferent,” that is, coexisting synthetically while remaining distinct. In this way, they interact and recode value. Value, then, is produced as a point of departure: the initial arrangement is resignified, its content shifts, and new possibilities of production arise. In Fieldware, these possibilities—those that escape and await activation—are understood as that which “detaches.”
To work with these values (to activate the content of what is given) and to extract what detaches, it is crucial to understand that no element remains fixed, since nothing escapes the generality of temporality; nothing persists as a pure instant. This impossibility fascinates me, for it reveals the instability of the object itself: always framed within a context or background, always bound to a specific temporality.
The frame operates on the object in two ways. First, as an absolute limit, in which the object would appear static in time, devoid of duration—an absolute closure. In this case, the object would contain within itself all its possibilities and would therefore be impossible. Second, the frame acts as a pathway of intersection, as context, in which this first limit is broken, since it is always in dialogue—open—with a concrete background. The latter we might understand as the relation of figure and ground; the former, as a figure that has escaped the entire space of possibility. In the case of figure and ground, the object is no longer object but rather those of its possibilities that have detached: a portion of its total potential, accessible once activated (mediated), and thus a representation of the “infinity of the instant.” In other words, it ceases to be object and becomes objective—something to which we can gain access.
Fieldware returns to The Wet Box and Third Extension through this notion of detachment, constituting in this case a hyperconnected landscape of decentralized relations. A network of intensities, a field of exchanges of value. We might say that Fieldware is dialogue itself, the application of each activation, a modification of substances, the exposure of content through the opening of the limit.
Fakewhale: Across d/wb you engage philosophy, semiotics, and cybernetics as active companions in the work. Beyond theoretical references, what role do you think art can play today in building new frameworks for mediation and collective imagination?
Ian Margo: The way I see it, the sole purpose of art as a field of action is to reconfigure our interaction with what is possible—to reformulate format, to continually produce a new landscape by working with the materials (technical, conceptual, contextual) that resonate with the contemporary. Art must generate experience (and experience, in turn, will produce discourse); it must be activated—that is, exposed, opened, observed, mediated. Its discursive capacity is inseparable from its frames, from the curatorial processes that act upon it, from the environments in which it unfolds in its fullest potential.
Art must, by necessity, always construct new frames. To expand the collective imagination is therefore its very substance. Format is not definitive, but rather the contingency through which the field is traversed. Art, which never ceases to be a process of production (and once the process ends, transforms into something else—whether a historical object or an exchangeable commodity), carries within itself the capacity of the possible. It holds what detaches, what is new, and must—by necessity—challenge and reconfigure what we understand as home (oikos). It must continually relocate value, and in doing so, approach the limit of the known so closely that it seems to arrive from outside, from elsewhere, as if to infect knowledge and the very media of its production with risky propositions, with disruptive aesthetics, with the experience of the new, the unfamiliar.
Release Details
LIVE September 24, 2025 7:00 PM CEST / 1:00 PM EDT
3 unique 1/1 video works
Price: 0.8 ETH each
Minting on Ethereum via Margo’s custom smart contract on manifoldxyz
Collectors of each minted 1/1 will also receive the corresponding parallel video channels as separate .mp4 files, provided as an integral extension of the work.
Curated by Fakewhale
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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