⚡ This website reflects my own engagement with BLACKBOX (founded by Dr Gavin Keeney). My research — including the kairos/chronos framework and the legal theoretical approach — is aligned with the project but remains my own. The site does not claim to represent BLACKBOX officially.
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. Yet the dominant legal architecture of authorship, built on exclusive rights, tends to enclose rather than enable. It constructs the creator as an owner only to facilitate dispossession.
This project explores three interconnected ideas: the relational link between creator and work (neither ownership nor abandonment), the cultural commons as shared inheritance, and the distinction between kairos and chronos — linear time versus the qualitative, disruptive time of a work’s ongoing life.
◈ BLACKBOX: a heuristic experiment ◈
Copyright attaches automatically on creation—or, in many jurisdictions, on fixation. Moral rights—the rights of attribution and integrity—are inalienable in many jurisdictions as a matter of law, particularly in civil law systems. In practice, however, the rise of multinational platforms has complicated this picture: their terms of service routinely require users to waive moral rights, and the enforceability of such waivers remains legally contested and jurisdictionally variable.
What BLACKBOX enacts, then, is not a denial of these legal facts but a performative refusal: a collective, arts-led protest against the enclosure of cultural works. In practical terms, this is achieved by dedicating works to the public domain (via CC0 or equivalent legal instruments) while using smart-contract registries to maintain a relational link between creator and work. The "no-rights" claim is thus a heuristic: a refusal of the current enclosure, and an invitation to imagine—and practice—what might come after.
Relational not proprietary
Blockchain registry anchors the author’s connection to the work — inalienable, but non proprietary. A moral rights inspired stake in the work’s ongoing life.
The cultural commons
The project draws on the conceptual logic of legal regimes that treat resources as held in common—the high seas, outer space, the global environment. These are not direct precedents (each is deeply contested), but they offer a vocabulary for imagining cultural works as shared inheritance, subject to stewardship and care, rather than private property.
Kairos vs. chronos
Copyright imposes linear, commodifiable time (chronos). The early experiments in this project—publication and on-chain registration—aim to work with the work's qualitative, disruptive life (kairos): circulation, transformation, and ongoing significance.
A heuristic for the future
BLACKBOX is a site of experimentation. It draws on critical legal studies, comparative international law, cultural theory and philosophy, but its core question is universal: how do we let works live?
Glossary of key terms
Decentralised Autonomous Organisation – an internet‑native organisation run by rules encoded as smart contracts, without central leadership.
A public, tamper‑evident ledger that records the creator’s relational link to a work without conferring exclusive property rights.
Self‑executing code on a blockchain that automatically enforces an agreement (e.g., registering a work or updating a pointer).
A deliberate refusal of exclusive intellectual property rights; the work is dedicated to the commons, while the creator retains a relational stake.
Originating in ancient Greek philosophy, chronos refers to sequential, measurable time (clocks, calendars, copyright terms). Kairos means the opportune, qualitative moment – the right time for action or meaning. This page uses the distinction to critique how copyright law imposes a linear, commodifiable time (chronos) that forecloses a work’s capacity to signify anew (kairos).
A vision of the internet built on blockchains and decentralised protocols, emphasising user ownership and peer‑to‑peer interaction. The term remains contested: critics point to continued platform centralisation, speculative finance, and unresolved governance questions. This page treats Web3 as a site of experimentation
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a core Web3 technology used to host this site.