Writing & Research
I read machinesmoney and machines the way I was trained to read paintings.
For a decade I put collections in order: cataloguing and digitizing, deciding what survives as evidence and how a record is read. That is still my trade. The material is now AI and the institutions taking it onmoney and AI and the institutions taking them on, and the writing here comes out of that work instead of standing beside it.
The work appears as essays, a book in progress, and a newsletter.
What I study
What a culture keeps, and what a new medium quietly lets it forget. Cultural-memory theory, training data, and who holds the power to interpret the record.
What still counts as proof once anything can be generated. Where a thing came from, and what survives forgery when the origin can be faked.
How institutions take on a technology they first refused, and why most adoption stalls.
Selected essays
The AI and governance writing, and the newer work, appear in Look again. The Bitcoin and culture writing runs mostly in Bitcoin Magazine, in print and online.
- The Other Threat: On AI, and what it asks of us Look again. · in progress
- What Does AI Remember? Cultural Memory in the Age of Large Language Models Look again. · 2026
- Anchoring Reality in the Age of AI: Bitcoin as Non-Simulable Provenance In print · 2026Bitcoin Magazine · Print, Issue 41 · 2026
- The Costs of Invisibility: Money, War & Fiscal Anaesthesia Look again. · 2026
- Payment Required: A Scenario Deconstruction from the Year 2036 Look again. · 2026
- The Avant-Garde and Bitcoin: Decentralized Money Didn’t Come From Nowhere Bitcoin Magazine · Big Read · 2025
- Rutherford Chang: Hundreds and Thousands at UCCA Beijing Bitcoin Magazine · 2026
- On the Value of Holding the History of Bitcoin in Your Hands Bitcoin Magazine · 2025
- A Defining Moment for Bitcoin Art at Sotheby’s: Tad Smith on Robert Alice’s Block 1 Bitcoin Magazine · 2025
- How Companies Are Adding Bitcoin Art to Their Corporate Collections Bitcoin Magazine · 2025
- Pepenardo (in Caps): The Cap Becomes Canon Bitcoin Magazine · Print, The Finance Issue · 2025
- A Brief History of Digital Art and Curation Bitcoin Magazine · Print, The Inscription Issue · 2024
More essays: Look again. on SubstackAll Bitcoin Magazine articles: bitcoinmagazine.com/authors/steven-reiss
Everything else: Look again. on Substack
The Culture Protocol, a book in progress
Thirty chapters on culture as the protocol layer institutions run on, and what governance must do when a new technology rewrites it: Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Yuk Hui, and others, applied to a technology they never saw.
Thirty chapters that re-read the modern mind through Bitcoin: Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Jan and Aleida Assmann, Yuk Hui, and others, applied to a technology they never saw.
The wager: the next stretch of adoption is more cultural than it is technical.
The wager: the next stretch of adoption, for Bitcoin and for AI alike, is more cultural than it is technical.
An early chapter is online: Re-reading the Modern Mind through Bitcoin.
Look again. · the newsletter
A working principle as much as a title: take something people think they understand, and show what they have missed. It is where the AI and governance essays appear first, and where the next ones will.
Read and subscribe: stenreiss.substack.com
Scholarly work
Earlier:Before Bitcoin: more than twenty scholarly publications from the decade inside universities, museums, and archives. A selection:
- Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Oesterley: Über das Leben Raffaels von Urbino. Die Göttinger Vorlesung aus dem Jahr 1841 (ed. Katja Mikolajczak and Michael Thimann, with Steven Reiss) Critical edition · Göttingen 2019
- Carl Oesterley an der Universität Göttingen. Kustos der Kunstsammlung und Professor für Kunstgeschichte In the Oesterley edition · 2019
- Albert Lang (1847–1933) – Ein Deutschrömer in der Kunstsammlung Exh. cat. Göttingen · Petersberg 2019
- ‚Der Seele innere Bilder‘ – Edvard Munchs Blicke in die eigene Vergangenheit Exh. cat. Hamburger Kunsthalle · 2016
- Weiß über Schwarz? Vom ästhetischen Bildkonzept im NSBM Interdisciplinary Studies on Antisemitism · Baden-Baden 2016
- St. Nikolai (with Ines Barchewicz) Göttinger Kirchen des Mittelalters · 2015
Plus eleven catalogue entries between 2015 and 2019, for the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hanover, and the Art Collection of the University of Göttingen. Full list on request.
Selected talks
- Viewfinder by Marcel Schwittlick and the History of Computer Art Opening lecture · Belvedere, Vienna · 2025
- Painting the Orange Pill Bitcoin Amsterdam · 2025
- Digitalisierung der Göttinger Kopialbücher AG Norddeutscher Universitätsarchive · 2022
- Edvard Munchs Skizzenbücher – Eine Sammlung von Bildgedichten, Kurzgeschichten, Kunsttheorie und Wahrnehmungsstudien Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich · 2022
- „Hier in Lübeck ist schön…" – Edvard Munch und Deutschland Behnhaus Drägerhaus, Lübeck · 2019
- Verschiedene Regionalportale hinsichtlich Nutzerfreundlichkeit und Entwicklungspotenzialen AG Regionalportale · 2018
Selected from more than a dozen talks at museums, universities, and professional associations since 2014. Full list on request.
Questions about the writing or the research are always welcome, in English or German.
I answer my own mail.
stenreiss@gmail.com