Distributed computing is a form of computation in which multiple computers connected by a network share a single task or a common state. Instead of concentrating processing in one central machine, each computer handles a part and communicates with the others to reconcile the results. It tolerates failures and scales well, but resolving disagreements about state between machines—consensus—becomes a central problem.
A Blockchain is an example of distributed computing without a central administrator. Many nodes hold copies of the same ledger and use a consensus procedure to fix the order and outcome of Transactions. As a result, no single party can easily rewrite or delete the record, and the results of programs executed there persist as state shared by all participants.
Examples
In its statement, "An Exhibition of Auto-Destructive Art," held at NEORT++ in October 2026, positioned the "distributed computing environment" as a place where works can run as code and persist while changing their state. It regarded this as the condition for implementing, as a property of computation itself, the structure that Gustav Metzger built into matter: a work that changes by itself and is eventually lost.