Preface to the AOF Provenance Protocol (APP)
Art of Faceless (AOF) was never meant to be permanent. Since 2012 it has appeared, collapsed, resurfaced, and fractured again — a pattern that mirrors the very systems it was born to critique.
The original 2012 trailer came from a very different world. Surveillance was still clumsy, algorithms had not yet consolidated control, and the idea of being “faceless” was playful — anonymity as glitch, not survival. In the years since, we have lived through a decade where facelessness became almost impossible: every phone a camera, every action logged, every face a dataset waiting to be cloned. Deepfakes, scraping, AI replication — none of this was imaginable when AOF first emerged.
What survives of AOF has always been the archive: fragments of projects that resist erasure by returning in new forms. In that sense, collapse was never failure — it was a feature. The gaps and absences are part of the work.
The AOF Provenance Protocol (APP) materialises from this cycle. It is not an academic solution, nor a corporate product. It (I/NULL) is the continuation of six decades of lived experiment that has endured through multiple eras of technology:
- fountain pens in schools,
- valve radios still humming in living rooms,
- negatives drying in darkrooms,
- the arrival of smartphones in every pocket,
- the internet mutating from optimism to enclosure.
APP acknowledges those shifts because it was shaped by them. Its credibility is lived, not theoretical. It is built on the experience of seeing copyright erode, of watching artists give away work to platforms that never valued it, of confronting the absurdity of blockchain promises against the reality of fragility.
This protocol is part system, part story. It exists here, now, as a real method for recording provenance. It also exists in The Hollow Circuit, where characters like Seya recover APP fragments as relics of a world that collapsed before theirs. That doubling is deliberate. All science fiction is, in some way, prophetic — and all archives are, in some way, fictional.
The aim is simple: preserve the first spark of creation before it is lost. Whether through a ledger, a zine, a hash, or a print — permanence comes from redundancy, not utopia.
APP is faceless because the work is bigger than the individual. Like AOF itself, it may collapse, disappear, and return again. That cycle is the proof.