Protocol as Poetry: Case Study on Pak's Protocol Arts

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12393v1
• Date: Sun, 18 May 2025 12:43:10 GMT
• Title: Protocol as Poetry: Case Study on Pak's Protocol Arts
• Abstract summary: Protocol art emerges at the confluence of blockchain-based smart contracts and a century-long lineage of conceptual art, participatory art, and algorithmic generative art practices.<n>This paper offers a focused case study of pioneering protocol artworks by Pak, an early and influential pseudonymous protocol artist who treats smart contracts as medium and protocol participation as message.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Protocol art emerges at the confluence of blockchain-based smart contracts and a century-long lineage of conceptual art, participatory art, and algorithmic generative art practices. Yet existing definitions-most notably Primavera De Filippi's "protocolism"-struggle to demarcate this nascent genre from other art forms in practice. Addressing this definition-to-practice gap, this paper offers a focused case study of pioneering protocol artworks by Pak, an early and influential pseudonymous protocol artist who treats smart contracts as medium and protocol participation as message. Tracing the evolution from early open-edition releases of The Fungible and the dynamic mechanics of Merge to the soul-bound messaging of Censored and the reflective absence of Not Found, we examine how Pak choreographs distributed agency across collectors and autonomous contracts, showing how programmable protocols become a social fabric in artistic meaning-making. Through thematic analysis of Pak's works, we identify seven core characteristics that distinguish protocol art: (1) system-centric rather than object-centric composition, (2) autonomous governance for open-ended control, (3) distributed agency and communal authorship, (4) temporal dynamism and lifecycle aesthetics, (5) economic-driven engagement, (6) poetic message embedding in interaction rituals, and (7) interoperability enabling composability for emergence. We then discuss how these features set protocol art apart from adjacent artistic movements. By developing a theoretical framework grounded in Pak's practice, we contribute to the emerging literature on protocolism while offering design implications for artists shaping this evolving art form.

Related papers

• A Technical Taxonomy of LLM Agent Communication Protocols [60.76747983053368]
  This study develops a technical taxonomy to classify and analyze large language models (LLMs) agent communication protocols.<n>The framework guides protocol selection and highlights open research gaps such as privacy and policy enforcement.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-06-17T14:45:20Z)
• Beyond Message Passing: A Semantic View of Agent Communication Protocols [19.409127393922216]
  Agent communication protocols are becoming critical infrastructure for large language model (LLM) systems.<n>This work presents a human-inspired perspective on this emerging landscape by organizing agent communication into three layers: communication, syntactic, and semantic.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-30T00:40:30Z)
• Advances in Art: Orthogonal Disruption and the Beauty in Schematics [0.0]
  This paper introduces Orthogonal Art, a proposed artistic discipline that emerges in dialectical response to artificial intelligence.<n>Unlike AI-augmented creative practices, Orthogonal Art is structurally defined by occupying the generative and conceptual spaces that current AI systems cannot access.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-25T09:40:46Z)
• A Two-Dimensional Framework for AI Agent Design Patterns: Cognitive Function and Execution Topology [54.72352855252792]
  We propose a two-dimensional classification that combines a Cognitive Function axis with seven categories and an Execution Topology axis with six structural archetypes.<n>The resulting 7x6 matrix identifies 27 named patterns, 13 with original names and provides a principled, framework-neutral, and model-agnostic vocabulary for AI agent architecture design.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-16T04:01:01Z)
• Does AI See like Art Historians? Interpreting How Vision Language Models Recognize Artistic Style [60.562013130566726]
  We characterize the mechanisms underlying VLMs' ability to predict artistic style.<n>We employ a latent-space decomposition approach to identify concepts that drive art style prediction.<n>In cases where an irrelevant concept was used to successfully predict style, art historians identified possible reasons for its success.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2026-03-11T17:49:45Z)
• Protocol Futuring: Speculating Second-Order Dynamics of Protocols in Sociotechnical Infrastructural Futures [1.4018975578160688]
  This paper introduces Protocol Futuring, a methodological framework that extends design futuring by foregrounding protocols-rules, standards, and coordination mechanisms.<n>We demonstrate Protocol Futuring through a case study of Knowledge Futurama, a multi-team participatory workshop exploring millennial-scale knowledge preservation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-12-05T19:26:43Z)
• AI-AI Esthetic Collaboration with Explicit Semiotic Awareness and Emergent Grammar Development [0.0]
  Two interacting large language models (Claude Sonnet 4 and ChatGPT-4o) demonstrated the spontaneous emergence of meta-semiotic awareness.<n>The interaction produced novel symbolic operators that functioned as operative grammar protocols.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-08-27T18:16:36Z)
• Seeing the Politics of Decentralized Social Media Protocols [15.148383833030714]
  Decentralized social media have been driven by concerns about the concentrated power of centralized platforms and their societal impact.<n>We analyze four such protocols -- ActivityPub, AT Protocol, Nostr, and Farcaster -- to develop a novel conceptual framework for understanding how protocols operationalize decentralization.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-05-29T01:04:45Z)
• A Communication Framework for Compositional Generation [0.7578439720012189]
  We present a self-supervised generative communication game-based framework for creating compositional encodings.<n>Our framework is based on rigorous justifications and proofs of defining and balancing the concepts of Efficiency, Unambiguity and Non-Holisticity in encoding.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-01-31T14:46:11Z)
• Learning Artistic Signatures: Symmetry Discovery and Style Transfer [8.288443063900825]
  There is no undisputed definition of artistic style.<n>Style should be thought of as a set of global symmetries that dictate the arrangement of local textures.<n>We show that by considering both local and global features, using both Lie generators and traditional measures of texture, we can quantitatively capture the stylistic similarity between artists better than with either set of features alone.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-12-05T18:56:23Z)
• Semi-supervised Chinese Poem-to-Painting Generation via Cycle-consistent Adversarial Networks [2.250406890348191]
  We propose a semi-supervised approach using cycle-consistent adversarial networks to leverage the limited paired data. We introduce novel evaluation metrics to assess the quality, diversity, and consistency of the generated poems and paintings. The proposed model outperforms previous methods, showing promise in capturing the symbolic essence of artistic expression.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-25T04:57:44Z)
• Pessimism of the Will, Optimism of the Intellect: Fair Protocols with Malicious but Rational Agents [0.6990493129893112]
  We present a game-based framework for the study of fairness protocols. It is based on the notion of strong secure equilibria, and leverages the conceptual and algorithmic toolbox of game theory.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-29T10:15:36Z)
• CreativeSynth: Cross-Art-Attention for Artistic Image Synthesis with Multimodal Diffusion [73.08710648258985]
  Key painting attributes including layout, perspective, shape, and semantics often cannot be conveyed and expressed through style transfer.<n>Large-scale pretrained text-to-image generation models have demonstrated their capability to synthesize a vast amount of high-quality images.<n>Our main novel idea is to integrate multimodal semantic information as a synthesis guide into artworks, rather than transferring style to the real world.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-25T10:42:09Z)
• P^3SUM: Preserving Author's Perspective in News Summarization with Diffusion Language Models [57.571395694391654]
  We find that existing approaches alter the political opinions and stances of news articles in more than 50% of summaries. We propose P3SUM, a diffusion model-based summarization approach controlled by political perspective classifiers. Experiments on three news summarization datasets demonstrate that P3SUM outperforms state-of-the-art summarization systems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-11-16T10:14:28Z)
• Entity Graph Extraction from Legal Acts -- a Prototype for a Use Case in Policy Design Analysis [52.77024349608834]
  This paper presents a prototype developed to serve the quantitative study of public policy design. Our system aims to automate the process of gathering legal documents, annotating them with Institutional Grammar, and using hypergraphs to analyse inter-relations between crucial entities.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-09-02T10:57:47Z)
• Revise and Resubmit: An Intertextual Model of Text-based Collaboration in Peer Review [52.359007622096684]
  Peer review is a key component of the publishing process in most fields of science. Existing NLP studies focus on the analysis of individual texts. editorial assistance often requires modeling interactions between pairs of texts.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2022-04-22T16:39:38Z)
• Emergent Graphical Conventions in a Visual Communication Game [80.79297387339614]
  Humans communicate with graphical sketches apart from symbolic languages. We take the very first step to model and simulate such an evolution process via two neural agents playing a visual communication game. We devise a novel reinforcement learning method such that agents are evolved jointly towards successful communication and abstract graphical conventions.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-11-28T18:59:57Z)
• Emergence of Pragmatics from Referential Game between Theory of Mind Agents [64.25696237463397]
  We propose an algorithm, using which agents can spontaneously learn the ability to "read between lines" without any explicit hand-designed rules. We integrate the theory of mind (ToM) in a cooperative multi-agent pedagogical situation and propose an adaptive reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to develop a communication protocol.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-01-21T19:37:33Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.