The Signature of All Things: The Digital Skin

Excerpt from The Signature of All Things: From Authentication to Authentic Meaning

Abstract (Excerpt)

In an age mediated by digital streams and intelligent agents, the nature of authenticity is in flux. The lines blur between the original and its echo, the tangible thing and its digital twin, the lived experience and its data shadow… The ways in which objects carry meaning, and the confidence we can place in that meaning, are being profoundly challenged and reshaped.

  • Prelude: The Crisis of Authenticity

  • Chapter 1: The Signature of the Real

  • Chapter 2: The Culture of Identity

  • Chapter 3: The Theatre of Memory

  • Chapter 4: From Authentication to Agency 

  • Appendix: Symbolic Infrastructure in the Age of AI (A Technical Translation)

THE DIGITAL SKIN (EXCERPT)

Every artwork today is born into duplication [...] it immediately and inevitably spawns a stream of digital emanations that accompany it and gather with it at every step of its lifecycle. Reproduced photographically, published on algorithmic platforms that program its reception and contextualise its dissemination, or even just archived privately in the studio: images, metadata, and documentation surround the work from all angles, like a digital skin.

The work itself may be a physical thing, but it bears a relation to this digital skin so incessantly and so immediately that we must question where the one ends and the other begins.

[…]

At the heart of the artwork is an irreducible presence—an experience that is embedded with the tangible presence of an object in a particular time and space. But around this core conscious experience of the object […] is a mesh of digital shadows.

“The act of becoming conscious consists in the concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and describing the unknown from many sides.” — Erich Neumann

Where Neumann’s concentric groupings emerge organically, today’s symbolic surrounds are often algorithmically stratified—mechanical, extractive, and disembedded from conscious integration.

This rupture is encoded into the very architectures of the digital systems we have inherited […] This escalating crisis of authenticity compels us to look deeper into the nature of the signature itself. […]

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The full abstract and structure for the manuscript can be viewed here: The Signature of All Things. Full manuscript available on request.