6 & 10 OCTOBER 2026

Palazzo Diedo

6 OCTOBER

6:00 PM — Attention Guild, Ground Floor

LECTURE
Protocol and Polis: the rise of post-AGI institutions
A conversation between Primavera De Filippi and Niccolò Milanese
in collaboration with Berggruen Institute Europe

In this lecture, Primavera De Filippi starts from a simple question: how can we hold an institution to account for its decisions when they are made by an artificial intelligence system? Until now, institutions have worked because those who decide reason as we do and can explain their choices. With AI, this can no longer be taken for granted, and making processes more transparent and automated is not enough to make them legitimate if those affected by them cannot contest them. Drawing on two decades of research at the intersection of law and code, De Filippi proposes rethinking our institutions so that they can benefit from the opportunities of AI while remaining answerable to the people they govern.

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10 OCTOBER

4:00 PM — Black Box, Second Floor

TALK
Monstrous Liveness vs. Human Deadness
A conversation between Venkatesh Rao and Simon Denny

The new world being born has a monstrous aspect that we nevertheless must embrace and transform with, creating “New Nature”, and if not, we end up performing a zombie dead humanism that’s more horrifying than monstrousness.

TALK
The Story of Protocol Art
A conversation between New Models and Dean Kissick

The story of Protocol Art presents an art historical lineage from Mallarmé to Duchamp, from Cage to the proliferation of non-object-based art in the 60s and 70s, through to meta strategies that emerge with the Y2K digital turn (and rise of Empire) onto what we call “protocol art” within our non-linear media framework of the present.

LECTURE PERFORMANCE
What is a Person?
A presentation by Sarah Friend

Drawing from her research at Protocol Institute, this talk discusses personhood as a series of protocols, tracing it through medieval political theology, to corporate personhood cases of the nineteenth century, and into contemporary shifts like the Te Awa Tupua Act. In this framework, personhood is a kind of API to the self, and we can use protocol-thinking to discuss how it might change as a result of emerging technology.

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6:00 PM - ONWARDS, Ground Floor

TALK & SOUND PERFORMANCE
STRIA
performance by John Chowning preceded by a conversation with Holly Herndon

STRIA is a piece fully generated by the computer, with the creation of all the parameters needed to play each sound, starting with a certain number of input sessions, elaborated by algorithms. The whole piece can be intended as played by a 26 instruments orchestra: each instrument generates one sound every time it is called to play; the sound played is different at every call, having different parameters used in the call itself.

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7:30 PM - ONWARDS, Ground Floor

LECTURE PERFORMANCE
AI and Theatre
By Hito Steyerl
In collaboration with Marek Poliks, Roberto Alonso Trillo, Mark Waschke

A first read is a rehearsal of a theatre piece in development. This read-through is the first experiment in a developing theatre piece about theatre as a method of AI training. If AI character training is scripted as dialogue, what possibilities open up for the arts, and the live arts in particular to invent different dramaturgies?