BLACKBOX
A "no-rights" venture in iterative scholarship
BLACKBOX is a venture founded by Dr Gavin Keeney. My involvement began in an editorial capacity: I co-edit Amicus Curiae, the journal of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, and in 2026 I co-authored a piece with Keeney for the journal. From that collaboration developed the special section on Law and Cultural Production, and from that, the development of the Eo1 infrastructure that carries BLACKBOX and its related projects.
The theoretical framing on this page is developed at more length in my monograph, What It Means for a Work to Live. This page describes BLACKBOX as I have come to understand it, and the questions my research brings to it. It is not an official account of the venture.
What does it mean for a work to live?
A work lives when it circulates, transforms, signifies: when it matters in ways that exceed its status as property.
That question is the centre of my monograph, What It Means for a Work to Live. BLACKBOX is one place I have been able to ask it in practice: to build infrastructure that would give a work's ongoing life a shape, a record, a way of persisting without being owned.
What BLACKBOX is
The name derives from the blackbox theatre: a small, unadorned performance space where the work and the audience are in close proximity. Keeney's practice in this tradition was to produce iterative, generative works (photo-essays, essays, transmedia pieces) that developed over successive stages, each stage provisional and superseded by the next. He called the essays that came after a stage post-rationalizations: accounts written after the fact, as a way of understanding what had been produced.
The term is now used in several senses within the venture:
- As a method — the practice of iterative, cumulative work-in-progress, in which each stage is provisional and open to being superseded. This is what BLACKBOX means in its origin sense.
- As an ethos — the "No Rights" stance of elective renunciation of intellectual property, in which works are dedicated to the cultural commons on the premise that a work's life is sustained by circulation, transformation, and reuse rather than by exclusive rights.
- As a phase — within a larger DAO-based research agenda, BLACKBOX names the stage at which interim works are produced as a research commons, to be carried forward into subsequent iterations.
- As a means — a way of sorting out the technical and legal questions of iterative production without committing, prematurely, to any particular registry architecture or governance model.
My reading is that the first sense—method—is the one that holds the others together. BLACKBOX is not primarily a project with a defined output, but a way of working whose natural output is a body of work that is never closed. This is my reading, not an official definition. I offer it because it is what allowed the Eo1 structure (with its clusters, its register, its editioning practice) to become intelligible to me.
What I brought to it
I came to the venture as an editor. Amicus Curiae published a co-authored piece by Keeney and me (Visual Law: The Absolute, 2026), and from that work developed both the special section on Law and Cultural Production and the proposal to test, in practice, whether the kind of iterative work BLACKBOX produces could be recorded and shared on non-proprietary infrastructure.
I was asked to develop the infrastructure for that test. It comprises three things.
A register. A thin, public record of works and their relations. It holds what a work derives from, who contributed to it, and when. It doesn't host files and makes no judgements of merit.
A cluster model. A cluster is a self-governing group organised around a shared inquiry. Clusters use the register but are not governed by it: membership, endorsement, dispute resolution, and editioning all happen within the group. The model draws on Elinor Ostrom's polycentric commons (ie many centres of decision, one shared substrate). The substrate provides only the minimal conditions for cross-cluster interoperability.
An attestation layer. A cryptographic proof, using the Ethereum Attestation Service on the Celo network, that a work's origin position is verifiable independently of any single platform. Anyone can check what a work was, when it was recorded, and by whom, without trusting the platform that holds it.
The register's design turns on a set of refusals, each of which was reached by trying and rejecting a plausible alternative:
- No gatekeeping — because admission would become a scarce good, and scarcity creates markets in access.
- No ranking — because ranking would become a hierarchy, and works would piggyback on high-visibility sources to borrow their shine.
- No tokens — because a token, even if non-transferable, would turn recognition into a commodity and tie the record to a holder. If the holder were lost (eg through death, incapacity, or simple absence) the record would be orphaned from its own authentication.
- No custody — because holding the works would make the register a point of failure.
What survives these refusals is the register's actual subject: the relation between works and the lineage of a work's life. The reasoning is set out at more length in The Register in Diagrams, and the artefact itself is live at eo1collective.org.
The questions I bring to the venture
BLACKBOX is not the subject of my research; it is one site where the questions my research asks have become concrete. Each of the concepts below is a question I approach through the venture, some drawn from its ethos, some from my own framework, some from the register I built.
Is a work a substance or a relation?
A work is not a substance but a relational pattern: something that exists in the network of its uses, users, and originators. The register records that relation without converting it into a property claim. The framing is developed at length in my monograph.
Can culture be held in common?
The venture's ethos draws on the conceptual logic of legal regimes that treat resources as held in common, such as: the high seas, outer space and the global environment. These provide a vocabulary for imagining cultural works as shared inheritance, subject to stewardship and care, rather than as private property.
What does a register do? And what does it not do?
The register is the shared record of works and their relations. It admits every contribution. Most systems collapse recording and governing, and the collapse is where capture begins: once admission is a scarce good, it becomes capital. Here, admission is not a judgement of merit: a work is in the register or it is not. Judgements happen within clusters (eg membership, endorsement or dispute). What is recorded is thin: a relation, a contributor, a date. The register hosts no files, so nothing accumulates into clutter.
How do we let works live?
BLACKBOX is a site of experimentation. It draws on artistic practice, comparative international law, cultural theory, and philosophy, but its core question is not proprietary to any one discipline: how do we let works live? The venture is one attempt at an answer: provisional, iterative, and open to being superseded.
Glossary of key terms
The venture's ethos: a deliberate refusal of exclusive intellectual property, in which works are dedicated to the cultural commons while the originator retains a relational stake.
Keeney's term for the essays and photo-essays that follow a stage of iterative work — accounts written after the fact as a way of understanding what has been produced.
A public, non-discretionary record of works and their relations. It records attribution without conferring ownership and refuses gatekeeping, ranking, tokens, and custody. Designed and built for Eo1.
A self-governing group organised around a shared inquiry, drawing on the register but not governed by it. Clusters set their own rules for admission, recognition, and dispute resolution. The model adopted for Eo1.
The account of a work as something that exists in the network of its uses, users, and originators rather than as a fixed substance. Developed in my monograph.
The principle that use of a work generates an obligation to the originator and to the cultural commons. Operates as a liability rule rather than a property rule, and its measure is socio-cultural, not only monetary. Articulated in my monograph.
A cryptographic proof that a piece of work existed at a certain moment and has not been altered since. The register's foundational primitive. Explored in Content Attestation.
Decentralised Autonomous Organisation: an internet-native organisation whose rules are encoded as smart contracts. In Keeney's framing, the DAO is the overriding entity and BLACKBOX is a phase within it. Discussed in The Register in Diagrams.
A contested term for the vision of an internet built on blockchains and decentralised protocols. This page treats Web3 as a site of experimentation, not as a settled category. Discussed in Why IPFS?