Editor’s note: This story is the latest edition of Link Rot, a new column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.
At the Palazzo Diedo, Venice, a striking juxtaposition defines the current cultural moment: the sleek, uncompromising edge of contemporary digital art set against the crumbling, historic majesty of a Venetian fresco. The exhibition, titled “Strange Rules”—curated by Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, and Hans Ulrich Obrist with Adriana Rispoli—functions less like a traditional gallery show and more like a manifesto. Within these walls, one encounters fortune-telling metal plants, a film designed to be generated by AI over the course of a millennium, two-headed flatworms, and hyperscans of brains engaged in pre-verbal communication.
In this space, the curators are staking out a definitive position on the nature of artistic authorship in an era where blockchain, generative AI, and decentralized networks have begun to dissolve the traditional boundaries of creative labor. The exhibition asks the oldest, most tiresome question in art history—“Is it art?”—and attempts to provide a modern, structural answer.
The Genesis of the Protocol: A New Artistic Framework
The inquiry “Is it art?” has long been a source of frustration for practitioners working at the bleeding edge of technology. It is a surface-level question that ignores the profound shifts in how creative systems are built. To move beyond this impasse, the curators of “Strange Rules” have introduced a shorthand that makes these complex practices legible: "Protocol Art."
According to the exhibition text, Protocol Art is defined as a practice that engages with the underlying rules determining how culture is produced, distributed, and perceived in the digital age. These rules manifest as algorithms, AI models, and technological infrastructures that harden through repeated use into the conditions of cultural life.
“Protocol Art operates at the level of the rule,” the text states. “It is 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.”
Chronology of a Shift: From Object to System
The transition from the “work of art” as a static object to the “protocol” as an active, generative system did not happen overnight. It is the result of decades of research into computational aesthetics and decentralized autonomy.
- 2008–2010: Ken Stanley releases Picbreeder, a platform that allowed users to evolve complex images through an iterative, collaborative selection process. This served as a conceptual precursor to modern generative AI feedback loops.
- 2014: Primavera De Filippi introduces Plantoid, a blockchain-based robotic lifeform that demonstrated how autonomous systems could own property and engage in self-replication through economic protocols.
- 2025: The launch of Feral (Epoch 1) marks the beginning of a 1,000-year cinematic experiment, where successive generations of artists and AI models will collaborate to create a film that no single living person will ever see completed.
- 2026: “Strange Rules” opens at Palazzo Diedo, officially codifying these disparate technological experiments under the banner of Protocol Art.
This chronology reveals a trajectory: the artist is moving away from the role of a craftsman who creates a final product and toward the role of a system architect who defines the parameters within which a work can emerge.
Supporting Data: Infrastructure as Creative Canvas
The Palazzo Diedo, recently renovated and managed by Berggruen Arts & Culture, is positioning itself as the global temple for this emerging discipline. But what differentiates Protocol Art from the "slop" of mass-produced generative content?
The distinction lies in the concept of the "operational chain." In a standard generative AI workflow—such as a user prompting a model to create a soap opera featuring fruit—the user acts as a consumer of a platform’s pre-existing, opaque logic. They are subject to the company’s aesthetic and ethical guardrails.
Protocol Art, conversely, requires the artist to intervene in the infrastructure. As Grégoire Chatonsky and Ida Soulard, members of the Feral team, argued in Libération, the author must:
- Choose their models: Curating the specific AI architecture.
- Train their corpus: Curating the data sets, not merely relying on mass-web scraping.
- Configure processes: Working locally with open-source software to maintain control.
- Accept material consequences: Owning the results of the specific system design rather than outsourcing creative judgment to an external company’s API.
This is the antithesis of the "prompt engineer" model. It is a deep, research-heavy commitment to the logic of the machine, viewing the algorithm not as a tool for convenience, but as a material to be sculpted.
Official Responses and the Legal Abyss
The legal establishment has been slow to catch up with these developments. Currently, the U.S. Copyright Office refuses to grant copyright to works created solely by AI, citing the absence of human authorship. While this policy protects traditional illustrators from being outcompeted by mass-produced "slop," it creates an ontological crisis for artists working in this new medium.
The Feral team’s public spat with the French National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC) highlights the tension. The CNC’s refusal to finance AI-assisted films stems from a fear of content dilution. However, artists like Chatonsky argue that this binary—human vs. machine—is a false one. They argue that if the "author function" is located in the design of the protocol rather than the pixel, then the work is undeniably human.
The exhibition at Palazzo Diedo serves as a rebuttal to the idea that AI-assisted art is inherently lazy. Instead, it frames these artists as "nerds" obsessed with the mechanics of their medium, seeking recognition for their labor in the same way a sculptor seeks recognition for their technique.
Implications for the Future of Artistic Value
What does this mean for the viewer? In the framework of Protocol Art, the art is not the visual manifestation on the screen, but the structure that enables that manifestation. When we interact with works like Picbreeder or Attention Guild, we are participating in the evolution of the work itself.
The traditional "aura" of the artwork, as described by Walter Benjamin, is shifting. It is no longer found in the unique, physical presence of the object, but in the specific, participatory encounter engendered by the artist’s code.
The Question of "Listening"
The philosopher Michel Foucault once predicted the disappearance of the "author function," suggesting a time when it would not matter "who is speaking." We have arrived at a point where the speaker might be a LLM, a bot, or an automated agent. Yet, as the exhibition suggests, the importance of the who has been replaced by the importance of the why.
When we are inundated with synthetic language and machine-generated visuals, the act of "listening"—or paying attention—becomes the final frontier of human agency. Protocol Art suggests that we should not be afraid of the machine, but rather concerned with the mind that orchestrated it.
As we navigate a future where the lines between human intent and algorithmic output blur, the success of an artwork will not be measured by its fidelity to reality, but by the integrity of the rules that brought it into existence. We are no longer asking if the image is beautiful; we are asking if the system behind it is worth our attention. In the halls of Palazzo Diedo, that answer seems to be a resounding yes.
