Experiencing the Conditions of Trust: A Practice-Based Exploration of Trust Formation Through an Artificial Society Environment

Blockchain systems promise to establish novel patterns of interaction within the spheres of commerce, governance, politics, and art. They allow for novel practices of contract formation, facilitating transactions in a quick, transparent, and verifiable manner. Their ability to establish self-enforcing smart contracts would likely lead to fundamental changes within everyday interpersonal interactions. Specifically, it would likely upend the position of trust within existing social practices. In this paper, we explore this problematic through the medium of generative art, embedded into a practice-based research strategy. The approach employs artificial societies as generative readymades which ground and inform practices of speculative design.