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Paper short abstract

This paper navigates how the tokenisation of images, from abstract art to AI-generated visuals, challenges norms and becomes a tool of resistance. By transcending traditional representation, token images on social media complicate meaning-making by reconfiguring values through technology.

Paper long abstract

This paper navigates the relationship between tokenisation, digital images, and activism, exploring how social causes connect to visual forms that signal moral and cultural values. These tokens require tangible forms to anchor them, even if that form is abstract—whether an image, a computer-generated interpretation, a hyperlink, or an absence that resists the web of relations its users might hold. The image form of a token allows users to represent their moral values as a material or semiotic connection to "imago." However, digital images' attachment to value shifts across symbolic systems, language, code, and its readability as visual objects through as machines and screens.

A Flusserian interpretation is employed to analyse how to "read" images, particularly through critical code studies, framing the black square as key examples of this. Abstract computational images convey violence and become tools for visual resistance. The suppressed value inscription challenges traditional semiotic structures. The paper concludes by exploring how the intersection of aesthetics, AI, and activism resonates with computational visibility through operational images and generative tokens, such as All Eyes On Rafah, contributing to new forms of visual resistance. Both works highlight the complexity of abstract activism as a visual form and virtue signalling on social media.

Keywords: tokenisation, digital resistance, black square, AI-generated images, abstraction, Flusser, Malevich, visual culture, activism.