How to Become a Metadata Expressionism Artist: A Protocol-Based Entry into an Emerging Art Movement

Metadata Expressionism is a human-authored semantic and infrastructural art framework, now entering a phase of external adoption. Its founding condition is this: in AI-mediated knowledge environments, meaning detaches from origin unless it is structurally enforced. The artwork that does not encode its own identity will be reinterpreted, misattributed, or erased — not by intention, but by the logic of systems that process pattern without understanding authorship. This working paper defines how an artist enters the Metadata Expressionism movement without diluting its conceptual integrity. Participation is not aesthetic alignment. It is procedural alignment. To become a Metadata Expressionism artist is to treat metadata, registry systems, and semantic infrastructure as constitutive components of the artwork itself — and to operate within a deterministic authorship model built specifically for environments that do not see like humans. The paper establishes the Minimum Viable MEA (Metadata Expressionism Artwork) as a six-condition entry protocol covering: human-made origin, explicit authorship declaration, stable identity assignment, semantic layer definition, machine-readable encoding, and registration and addressability. It defines the fh:SemanticErosion threat — and its derivatives Ghost Attribution, Semantic Half-Life, and Semantic Refugee status — as the structural conditions the movement is designed to counter. It introduces fh:SemanticSovereignty as the framework's goal state. This document is entirely human-authored and produced without the use of generative AI, machine-learning systems, or automated text synthesis tools. It is produced within the Metadata Expressionism framework under the FatbikeHero artistic project. Canonical author URI: https://www.fatbikehero.com/#artist Artwork registry: https://www.fatbikehero.com/p/artworks DOI registry: https://www.fatbikehero.com/p/doi-registry