curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli Joshua Citarella, Harold Cohen, Primavera De Filippi, Simon Denny with Venkatesh Rao, Stephanie Dinkins, Fabien Giraud, He Zike, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ho Tzu Nyen, New Models, Ayoung Kim, Agnieszka Kurant, Michael Levin, Trevor Paglen, Philippe Parreno, Lorenzo Senni, Avery Singer, Ken Stanley, sub, terra0
Strange Rules is a large-scale group exhibition at Palazzo Diedo in Venice that introduces the concept of Protocol Art as a category of artistic practice engaging with the infrastructural rules that organise contemporary life.
The exhibition understands protocols as cultural and political instruments that determine how images, data, identities and relations are produced, circulated and governed. Through installations, video works, sound pieces and software-based environments, the participating artists render these otherwise opaque structures intelligible, foregrounding the ways in which algorithmic systems, AI models and platform logics precondition perception, behaviour and imagination.
By treating regulatory and computational frameworks as both material and object of inquiry, Strange Rules articulates Protocol Art as a mode of practice that seeks to reconfigure the conditions of cultural production from within. In doing so, the exhibition intervenes in wider debates on artificial intelligence, automation and digital governance, and proposes that artistic work can operate as a site where the normative scripts of contemporary technoculture are critically exposed, negotiated and potentially rewritten.
