White Papers on Dissent: Rethinking Art, Value, and Resistance Through Blockchain

How artists challenge blockchain’s financial logics to reimagine value, community, and futures beyond capitalism.

White Papers on Dissent explores blockchain technology beyond its economic narratives and technical promises, framing it as a social device to rehearse post-capitalist imaginaries. Far from being a neutral infrastructure, blockchain has become a contested terrain where governance, value, and cooperation are redefined. Barbara Cueto moves beyond market-driven interpretations to explain how blockchain can function as a tool for radical imagination—a structure that, despite its entanglements with finance, holds the potential to support alternative forms of social organization.

Bridging art history, political theory, and technology studies, and inspired by David Graeber, Joseph Beuys, and J.K. Gibson-Graham, the book introduces Critical Blockchain Art as an artistic practice that appropriates blockchain as both a conceptual framework and a technical infrastructure for political experimentation. Rather than reproducing speculative markets or technological spectacle, these projects engage with the social and material conditions of blockchain to question how value is produced, how cooperation is organized, and how dissent can be enacted. In doing so, they build on the legacy of socially engaged art and institutional critique, while opening new spaces for testing alternative modes of governance and rethinking the infrastructures that shape collective life.

Barbara Cueto is the curator of the 40th edition of the transmediale festival in Berlin. She has convened and curated projects internationally and holds a PhD in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam.