At the 61st Venice Biennale (2026), Palazzo Diedo hosts Strange Rules, an exhibition that introduces and examines the concept of "protocol art." The project was created by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon with curatorial involvement from Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli. The show interrogates the intersections of artificial intelligence, digital infrastructures and networked culture.
What the exhibition shows and where
On the ground floor visitors encounter a new collaborative work by Dryhurst and Herndon, produced in cooperation with the Berlin-based architecture studio sub. This space also serves as a venue for talks, performances and screenings, and the installation remains on view for the duration of the exhibition.
The first floor hosts site-specific installations and a curated selection of video works that expand the themes of protocol art and enter into direct conversation with the ground‑floor program. On the second floor, in Palazzo Diedo's black box, video pieces examine the complex layers of contemporary society, its entanglement with technology, and the invisible protocols that quietly operate beneath the surface.
Defining protocol art
Strange Rules deliberately avoids foregrounding technological spectacle or the novelty of encountering AI. Instead, it asks a deeper question: which systems govern the circulation and visibility of culture? The exhibition treats algorithms, machine‑learning models, databases, search engines and platforms not as neutral tools but as cultural structures — invisible architectures that determine how information flows, how art circulates, how visibility is distributed, and ultimately how meaning is produced.
In this view, the medium is no longer simply image, sound, text or video; the protocol itself becomes the medium. Drawing from conceptual and Fluxus traditions of the 1960s, the project applies an extended notion of "protocol art" to the contemporary terrain of AI, probing the rules and contractual frameworks that organize algorithms, data models and intelligent systems.
Relevant previous projects
Herndon and Dryhurst are not new to working with AI. Holly Herndon's Holly+ project, included in the 2022 Ars Electronica Planet B program, is a notable example: rather than a mere deepfake exercise, Holly+ functioned as a digital identity protocol, making a "digital twin" of Herndon's voice available under a community licence while its use was governed by decentralized, community-based decision-making.
Their 2024 project The Call, shown at Serpentine North in late 2024, demonstrated their approach to protocol design in practice. Visitors could follow the process of "training" an AI: the project developed new protocols for creating choir AI models. Herndon and Dryhurst compiled a songbook of exercises and recording guidelines, and with the Serpentine Arts Technologies team they recorded fifteen community choirs across the United Kingdom. The immersive, interactive spatial audio installation was built on those AI models and revealed the networked, collective nature of 21st-century creation by exposing the system's production process as well as the finished work.
Recent projects by the duo explore community-owned datasets, collective licensing structures, participatory AI systems and legal frameworks to protect artists in the era of machine learning. Participation — involving communities, researchers, programmers, singers and institutions — is central to their creative practice.
Participants and range of contributors
Strange Rules includes participants who are not conventional artists. The exhibition features work by AI researcher Ken Stanley (Picbreeder), biologist Michael Levin, and artists and collectives such as Trevor Paglen, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Simon Denny and terra0. Together, these contributions address surveillance systems, automated governance, decentralized ownership and the agency of machines.
Why the exhibition matters
A central claim of Strange Rules is that power increasingly resides in protocols rather than solely in governments, museums, corporations or the media. Recommendation systems decide what music we hear; search engines and recommender algorithms determine which images we encounter; the datasets used to train these systems shape what AI systems can "imagine." Contractual terms and policy rules decide which topics, words, opinions or aesthetics become visible and which disappear. These mechanisms are largely invisible to users, yet they fundamentally shape everyday life — whether in the arts or in public affairs.
The exhibition thus highlights political and cultural consequences: the issue for artists is not the existence of AI per se, but the risk that cultural infrastructure becomes governed by closed, corporate protocols.
Theoretical context
The show's arguments resonate with Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever (1995), specifically the idea of an archival drive. While older media primarily stored and transmitted culture, AI systems actively reorganize cultural archives and generate new outputs, predictions and patterns. Strange Rules positions AI as the technological culmination of the archival impulse: cultural archives have grown to such a scale that only machine systems can process them.
Final note
By focusing on protocols as cultural structures, Strange Rules asks who designs the rules that now structure culture and challenges visitors to consider the visible and invisible governance embedded in digital systems.
Opening image: ground-floor installation. Photo: Palazzo Diedo
Keywords: 61st Venice Biennale — 2026, protocol art, AI, artificial intelligence
