42: Strange Rules and Protocol Art at the Venice Biennale—Trevor Paglen & Primavera De Filippi with Peter Bauman

In this episode, host Peter Bauman (Le Random's editor in chief) speaks with artists Trevor Paglen and Primavera De Filippi about Protocol art.The occasion is Strange Rules, the landmark group exhibition co-conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Holly Herndon, and Mat Dryhurst, running at the Palazzo Diedo in Venice for the full duration of the Biennale. The show offers the most institutionally significant framing of protocol art to date, and Paglen and De Filippi represent two of its most distinct vantages.The conversation opens with the question of how each artist situates their practice within the protocol framework. Paglen, long known as a revealer of hidden infrastructures, reflects on a career built between systems observation and systems intervention. He and on how his new work Voyager marks a turn inward, toward consciousness rather than exposure. De Filippi, a longtime Protocol art theorist and one of the few artists to self-define as a protocol artist, walks through her Protocolism Manifesto and the decade-long Plantoid project that preceded it, sharpening a key distinction: the difference between making art on top of a protocol and making the protocol itself as the creative act.Meanwhile, our Monday Editorial with Shohei Fujimoto completes our Venice Biennale coverage for the week. (More to come!)00:04 Introduction & The Strange Rules Exhibition01:39 Trevor Paglen's Work: Voyager and the Pivot Inward02:49 Trevor Paglen on Protocol Art & Post-Minimal Influences04:57 Primavera De Filippi Defines Protocol Art & the Protocolism Manifesto08:13 Voyager Explained: AI That Hypnotizes You10:22 Plantoid: The Self-Replicating Blockchain Sculpture13:34 The Breadth of Protocol Art & the Venice Biennale as Platform17:43 Why Protocol Art Is Rising: Generative AI & the Meta-Layer20:57 Photography, Modernism & the Current AI Rupture23:35 Capital-A Algorithm: Fear, Critique & Alternatives26:36 Embracing the Algorithm: Open Source & Artistic Autonomy30:05 Consciousness, Entanglement & Voyager's Six Journeys33:41 Synthetic Life, Symbionts & Machine Qualia39:05 Protocol Art as a Lens for Economics, Politics & Technology42:34 Protocol vs. Instantiation, Copyright & Closing Thoughts