What if intelligence has no fixed address? At Palazzo Diedo in Venice, Mat Dryhurst, Holly Herndon, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli stage Strange Rules, a six-day case that cognition exceeds its substrate.
Strange Rules opened on 4 May 2026 in the ground-floor nave of Palazzo Diedo, the Venetian palazzo operated by Berggruen Arts and Culture, and ran through 9 May. The project introduced Protocol Art to describe work that does not simply use algorithms, artificial intelligence models, or platform infrastructures as tools but takes them as its subject: exposing, analysing, and transforming the invisible rule systems that shape how culture is produced and perceived. It is less a statement about technology than about where authorship sits when the instructions that generate work are as consequential as the work itself.
The ground floor, spatially redesigned by SUB under the direction of Niklas Bildstein Zaar, anchors a commission by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon. Black lacquered pew benches run in symmetric rows under a dense steel grid that Zaar's practice has suspended from the baroque ceiling, establishing a technological overlay on an eighteenth-century interior. The grid draws the eye upward to read both registers simultaneously. Lectures, performances, and screenings occupy the same floor throughout the run.
The first floor presents site-specific installations and video works in dialogue with the ground-floor programme; the second floor's Black Box is given over to video. The three floors do not escalate from accessible to specialist: they operate in parallel, each offering a different temporal mode for the same set of questions. A suspended cast-resin form hanging by a single thread in near darkness suggests audio hardware from a technological genealogy that never quite existed.
Dryhurst and Herndon frame the project around what they call the protocological layer: the operational logic that precedes any individual choice a platform, model, or institution makes. The large-scale backlit projections in several rooms articulate this through morphological forms that suggest organic processes but are entirely generated through parametric instruction. The patterned black bench surfaces carry a compressed data-visual texture that reads as weathered grain from a distance and resolves on approach into something closer to a rendered signal map.
Alongside the exhibition, Palazzo Diedo is producing a publication aimed at establishing the first comprehensive account of Protocol Art as a field. Research unfolds throughout the run, with the palazzo itself serving as both exhibition site and working environment. Strange Rules closes on 9 May 2026; the publication extends the conversation beyond the five-day window.
