A series of twelve seminars and a closing symposium, presented from September 2020 through May 2022, As for Protocols is structured as one-long open curriculum. Led Vera List Center staff and faculty in collaboration with The New School faculty, partner organizations or independent curators, each monthly seminar in this two-year-long series examines a particular aspect of protocols, among them those relating to language and communication; protocols for equitable networks, computer interfaces, and algorithms; global health and development; data aggregation and narrative systems; culturally-specific community agreements; and protocols undergirding scientific research.

Building on the conversations started in previous sessions, each seminar is foregrounded by an artistic experience and accompanied by readings.

Seminar 1: Protocols as Language and Communication
September 14, 2020 
6-8 pm EDT
Online

Convened with Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, the first of these seminars considers relationships between linguistic, technical, aesthetic, social, and ethical protocols with Taeyoon Choi, Jesse Chun, Meredith D. Clark, and Chancey Fleet. 

Seminar 2: Protocols for Community and Equitable Networks [as applied to education]
October 19, 2020 
6-8 pm EDT
Online

Convened with Robert Sember and Jennifer Kabat with artist Shani Peters of  The Black School; Tsige Tafesse of the collective BUFU (By Us For Us); and artist Caitlin Cherry, founder and co-director of Dark Study this seminar explores the protocols for education outside the neoliberal university to prioritize care, fugitivity and shared learning.

Seminar 3: Protocols and Biopolitics
November 16, 2020 
6–8 pm EST 
Online 

Convened with Josh Scannell, Assistant Professor of Digital Media Theory at The New School’s School of Media Studies with Anthony Ryan Hatch, Ronak K. Kapadia, Jasbir Puar, and artists Stephanie Misa and James Clar this seminar explores the relationships between the body, race, and technology, especially as they play out during a pandemic, with its own set of protocols, and when so much is laid to waste and so much else is up for grabs.

Seminar 4: Reimagining Protocols: Reclaiming, Challenging, and Queering Surveillance
February 8, 2021
6–8 pm, EST
Online

How have theorists and artists challenged these imposed protocols, engaging in what scholar Simone Browne has called “troubling surveillance,” to address the spillover of military surveillance into our civilian lives? Convened with Fabiola Hanna, with artists and scholars American Artist, Margaret Laurena Kemp, Shaka McGlotten, and Abram Stern (aphid).

Seminar 5: Protocols of Revolutionary Feminisms to Re/make the World
March 8, 2021
3–4:30 pm, EST
Online

For International Women’s Day, the fifth seminar, convened with Ujju Aggarwal and Laura Y. Liu, explores the theme of revolutionary feminisms, and the multi-scalar and trans-historical practices they embody, especially in the context of social reproduction, gendered labor, care and kinship, solidarity, and internationalism. Speakers include Loira Sambal, Nadine Naber, Paula X. Rojas, and Robyn Spencer.

Seminar 6: Lab Work: Art of the Experiment
April 5, 2021
5–7 pm, EDT
Online

This seminar seeks to use and remake “the scientific experiment” in consideration of critical histories and theories of technoscience and with acknowledgment of “the experiment” as always also a site of Empire, but whose uses are sometimes democratized, queered, and decolonized by various practices. Convened with Jeannine Tang, with artists fields harrington, Mary Maggic, and Claire Pentecost.

The seminar series concludes for this academic year with a two-day symposium in May co-presented with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

SYMPOSIUM
To Hold Things Together
May 20–21, 2021
11 am–2 pm, EDT
Online

To Hold Things Together is a two-day symposium on protocols of encounter and solidarity in today’s hyper-local and hyper-dispersed existence. As a collaboration between the Vera List Center and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, in Utrecht, it also enacts modes of social and institutional nodality, and concludes the first year of the VLC’s program cycle As for Protocols.

CONVERSATION
Kite: Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way
May 21, 2021
6–7:30 pm, EDT
Online

Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite hosts a conversation with artistic and research collaborators on her year-long VLC project Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road) focused on how Lakȟóta ontology can inform art and world-making in a “Good Way.”

Seminar 7: Drones and the Bird’s-Eye View
September 20, 2021
2–3:30 pm EDT
Online

Co-convened with High Line Art, with artist Heba Amin, curator Roger D. Connor, and The New School faculty Peter Asaro, and moderated by High Line Art Associate Curator Melanie Kress, we consider how bio-inspired design influenced drone technology development, as well as ongoing conversations about various forms of technological intelligence in warfare.

Seminar 8: Work in the Cultural Economy We Want: Cooperatives
November 8, 2021
1–2:30 pm EST
Online

Convened with artist Caroline Woolard of Art.coop, cultural cooperatives leaders Pia Mancini, Ramsey Nasser, and Daniel Park discuss protocols that build shared political, economic, and cultural power.

Seminar 9: Bridge: Protocols of Jazz and Modernism
December 6, 2021
6–7:30 pm EST
Online

Serubiri Moses convenes a conversation anchoring the conceptual structure of jazz as a space of entanglement and dialogue, with artist Raymond Pinto, scholar Tendayi Sithole, and musician Yoko Suzuki. 

Seminar 10: School of Tomorrow: From the Open Plan to the Tele-classroom
March 21, 2022 [POSTPONED]
6–7:30 pm EST
Brooklyn Army Terminal/Online hybrid

Convened with Video School, a roving pedagogical platform facilitated by Gabo Camnitzer, Joseph Lubitz, and Candice Strongwater, School of Tomorrow is held within Adelita Husni-Bey’s installation All The World Receives A Jolt! at Brooklyn Army Terminal. This seminar brings together a series of live readings and video transmissions by educational theorists, artists, and sociologists that consider the social and spatial dimensions of educational architectures.

Seminar 11: Forces of Art: Protocols of Evaluation
April 4, 2022
5–6:30 pm EDT
The New School/Online

How do we sustain politically engaged, community-focused art practices in times of ecological crises, the pandemic, a seemingly global playing field, and the persistence of colonial legacies? In this VLC Seminar, we discuss how expansive notions of impact and “success” can be arrived at when artists are invited to establish the protocols of evaluation.

The Case for a Panorama is the art project commissioned for this occasion from Mbali Dhlamini and Phumulani Ntuli, members of the Johannesburg-based artist collective Preempt Group. The other speakers are curators Kabelo Malatsie (Johannesburg/Bern), Rocca Holly-Nambi (Nairobi/Isle of Portland, UK) and Carin Kuoni, all contributors to Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World, a critical anthology on broadly diverse evaluation practices today.

Seminar 12: Breaking Protocols: Desire Lines
May 16, 2022
6–7:30 pm EST
Location to be announced

This seminar is presented as the final seminar in the Vera List Center’s As for Protocols series. It brings together the artist duo Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, with dance artist and audio describer Tess Dworman, architect Jing Liu, and performance curator and scholar Noémie Solomon to examine the notion of “desire lines” and to reflect on how we situate desire in relation to the protocols that govern our daily existence.

Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Supplanting traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are languages that regulate how people relate to each other, to their cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. They are evidence of governmental, organizational, social, or corporate power structures. Protocols speak to processes, rather than finite outcomes. While often overlooked or invisible, they set the tone and conditions for potential encounters. Investigating them as such will allow us to contribute to the creation of new protocols that are inclusive and equitable, ranging from computer interfaces, A.I., data aggregation, and algorithms to community agreements and culturally-specific engagement protocols to protocols undergirding scientific research. As “protocol” may also refer to documentation and minutes, the term signals a hybrid time frame of both the past and projection into the future. With the engagement of artists, scholars, activists, and students, the Vera List Center will consider protocols as the foundations for the performance of living, and begin thinking and working toward new spaces of political empowerment.