Protocol Art: How Artists Work with Rules and Systems

What if the artwork is not an image, object, or output, but the rules that determine what can happen?

This seminar explores Protocol Art, a term for artistic practices that shift attention from individual outputs to the systems, rules, and forms of coordination through which culture emerges. As artist and researcher Mat Dryhurst puts it, artists can work “one level upstream”: not only creating within existing systems, but shaping the protocols and conditions that determine what becomes possible in the first place.

Protocols structure networks and blockchains, platforms and AI systems, but they can also be social, economic, institutional, or cultural. They determine who can participate, how decisions are made, where authority resides, and what kinds of actions become possible.

The seminar takes as its starting point Anika Meier’s conversations with artists and thinkers including Mat Dryhurst, Rhea Myers, Primavera De Filippi, Simon Denny, Sarah Friend, and Trevor Paglen. Through these different perspectives, we will examine how artists work with, question, and reshape the protocols that increasingly structure cultural production.

How does authorship change when artists create rules rather than outcomes? Who or what has agency within a protocol? How can protocols be used, challenged, manipulated, or redesigned? And what happens when artists begin to work at the level of the systems that increasingly shape culture?