![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/9.-Ken-Stanley-Picbreeder-2008-2020.-Installation-View-of-Strange-Rules-Palazzo-Diedo-Berggruen-Arts-Culture.-Photo-credit-Joan-Porcel.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tProtocol Art is, per the exhibition text, \u201ca practice that engages with the underlying rules that determine how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in a digital age. These rules manifest as algorithms, AI models, platforms, technological infrastructure and social convention, hardening through use into the conditions of cultural life. Protocol Art operates at the level of the rule: not only analyzing these systems but seeding new ones. The protocol is not the subject of art: it is the art. When the protocol is the art, the scientists and researchers authoring such rules become artists.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Palazzo Diedo\u2014recently renovated and run by Berggruen Arts & Culture\u2014means to become the temple of Protocol Art, and not only because of \u201cStrange Rules.\u201d More research and exhibitions on the practice are forthcoming.<\/p>\n
\n\tAt first blush, the definition might seem overly broad\u2014like the same golden-ratio diagram laid over a picture of a cat, a supermodel\u2019s face, a painting, and a sunset. The show makes a display of the wide range of work that can coexist under this model, from biologist Michael Levin\u2019s Double-Headed Planaria<\/em>\u2014in which his research on, and manipulation of, genetic code is the relevant \u201cprotocol\u201d\u2014to Trevor Paglen\u2019s Voyager<\/em> (2026), a self-guided meditation in which language (protocol!) generates images in the mind of the audience member. But Protocol Art is perhaps most useful when we consider what it excludes: an illustrator painting concept art on his Wacom tablet, someone prompting a text-to-video model to make soap operas starring humanoid fruit, or anyone else using widely available technologies to create a visual output without investigating, intervening in, or hijacking its infrastructural and social logics. This is not to suggest that illustration and AI video content demand the same creative skills, only that Protocol Art makes swift work of distinguishing itself from work shaped by, let\u2019s say, external tastes: those of the company commissioning the illustration, or the algorithmic pressures and analytics that mold the content posted by \u201ccreators.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tProtocol Art proposes another crucial distinction. If most people tend to think of the art as the visual or sonic manifestation one encounters, Protocol Art locates the art not in its manifestations but in the work that generates them. To give one example: digital artists can adjust the dimensions of a work as needed, so that it can be displayed on screens of multiple sizes and orientations. The \u201clocation\u201d of the art isn\u2019t fixed. By that logic, the authorial content of the work resides in the structure the artist has designed, not in any particular manifestation. This mode of authorship is key not only to grasping the malleability of an audience\u2019s visual encounter with an artwork, but to understanding that the artistic encounter engendered by technologies like blockchain and AI is highly participatory and, often, specific to the viewer.<\/p>\n \n\tWorks on view like Ken Stanley\u2019s Picbreeder <\/em>(2008\/2020), Primavera De Filippi\u2019s Plantoid <\/em>(2014), and Dryhurst and Herndon\u2019s Attention Guild<\/em> (2026) feature a participatory element that guides the development of each piece\u2019s form over time. Take Picbreeder<\/em>, in which two sleek, glowing forms\u2014one resembling a car, the other a frog\u2014appear onscreen. Both images were generated as users navigated a website Stanley designed to let them pick their preferred variants of images, which then became the basis for a new set of generated images. Stanley, a researcher in artificial intelligence and machine learning, created a kind of precursor to the training later experienced by early users of generative AI models, in which a prompt returns four images, the user selects one, and four more are made. Over time, this selection process produced a kind of mass AI aesthetics, as the models learned average human preferences from millions of signals and gradual adjustments. These models, like the works around them, are impossible without a high degree of participation. But even though the final form of Stanley\u2019s work would not exist without participation, that final form is not, per the curators\u2019 understanding of Protocol Art, where the authorship lies. The authorship lies in the orchestration of participation.<\/p>\n \n\tYet while Protocol Art is a neat and productive frame for understanding how the relationship between art and author is shifting in the modes of artmaking on view in \u201cStrange Rules,\u201d it is also a shield. The show and its framing build an argument about authorship that artists can point to when defending their use of certain tools, such as AI, as cultural institutions and legal frameworks mobilize some forms of resistance against them, irregardless of how they are being manipulated.<\/p>\n \n\tThe existential drive for differentiation underlying Protocol Art is clearest in the case of Feral (Epoch 1)<\/em> (2025\u20133025), a film shot and edited by AI and meant to unfold over the course of one thousand years, through the successive interventions of 32 generations of artists. Fabien Giraud is responsible for Epoch 1; Pierre Huyghe is tapped for Epoch 2; and after that, who knows\u2014the artist may not even be born yet.<\/p>\n \n\tThe team behind The Feral<\/em>, as the overall project is known, has been at the forefront of the battle over AI authorship. Last September, Gr\u00e9gory Chatonsky and Ida Soulard, both members of the Feral team, published an op-ed in the French newspaper Lib\u00e9ration taking issue with the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image\u2019s (CNC) decision not to finance films made with AI. Chatonsky, a co-scriptwriter for the AI, and Soulard, head of The Institute, the research and education platform that developed The Feral<\/em>, argue that while the AI images and videos proliferating on social media might seem to vindicate the CNC\u2019s decision, the real issue isn\u2019t the technology but the absence of an author.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhat a machine without an author produces has a name: slop,\u201d Chatonsky and Soulard write. That is to say: anyone using text-to-video generative AI is not an author.<\/p>\n \n\tBut then what form of authorship is possible in a world \u201cpermeated by generative AI,\u201d as Chatonsky and Soulard put it? Here is their definition: \u201cThe author chooses their models, trains their corpus, configures their processes, works locally with open-source software, and accepts the material consequences of their choices. Authorship no longer resides solely in the final image; it now permeates the entire operational chain.\u201d Their definition aligns perfectly with the boundaries of Protocol Art.<\/p>\n \n\tVoids of authorship abound. Currently, the US Copyright Office does not recognize work made with AI as having an author. Though the effect is positive as it protects the livelihoods of commercial artists, the legal abyss it produces seems unbearably strange: where, then, does the work come from? For Chatonsky and Soulard, the ontological possibility of authorlessness is not incorrect, just too broadly applied.<\/p>\n \n\tAm I suggesting, then, that Protocol Art is a mere purification ritual, meant to separate the valid from the invalid, the artist from the teeming masses? No \u2014though let\u2019s leave the matter of film, AI, and funding to one side. Or maybe yes\u2014but that\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing. This separating of spheres feels particularly crucial given the embarrassment surrounding NFTs that still lingers among many art professionals. If there is one lesson that household names like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol have taught the public, it is that \u201canything\u201d can be art. By gesturing (metaphorically) toward the sign at the door of the MoMA gift shop, some loud voices in the NFT crowd recast any negative reaction to their work as mere elitist gatekeeping, aligning themselves not only with the irreverent vanguard of the Factory but with leading artists of the 21st century such as Damien Hirst and Maurizio Cattelan. And while Cattelan, too, has drawn the crucial distinction between the work (the deed) and its malleable expression (the banana), in \u201cStrange Rules\u201d the tone is not one of mischievous irreverence\u2014the glee of what one got away with\u2014but of intense care. These people are nerds, and they want their obsessive labors recognized.<\/p>\n \n\tThe French philosopher Michel Foucault predicted that one day \u201cthe author function will disappear [\u2026] behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHas that day arrived? I\u2019d argue the important question is a different one.<\/p>\n \n\tAs works that were authored are pressed into a machine that produces an authorless average, and as dissemination technologies like the internet inundate us with language that may or may not come from a bot concocted by a PR firm, we now find ourselves obsessed not just with who is speaking, or what is speaking, but\u2014more importantly\u2014with this: \u201cIs it worth listening to?\u201d The answer to this question is not found, according to the framework of Protocol Art, in sussing out the nature of the machine but rather the mind manipulating it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/artists\/strange-rules-venice-exhibition-asks-what-is-art-1234795127\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/lawrenceabuhamdan-waterfalls.png?w=1024″] Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0This story is the latest edition of\u00a0Link Rot, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet. At the Palazzo Diedo, you can find a typically Venetian pleasure: seeing the sleek edge of contemporary art set against the backdrop of a fading fresco. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2098607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2098607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2098607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2098607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2098607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2098607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Strange](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/3.-Fabien-Giraud-The-Final-Epoch-1-2025-%E2%80%93-2026-Installation-View-of-Strange-Rules-Palazzo-Diedo-Berggruen-Arts-Culture.-Photo-credit-David-Levene.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>