Protocol, Taste, and Systems

Primary source: Brian Droitcour, "Beautiful Rules," Outland, November 25, 2025.

What protocol art is

Droitcour opens with a definition: protocol art names practices where artists "don't just make images but devise systems that govern how images appear, circulate, and take on meaning." Mat Dryhurst calls this operating "upstream of media." The critical distinction: protocol artists don't produce for existing channels — they reshape "the habits and expectations that structure aesthetic experience itself."

The problem Droitcour identifies: protocol art is hard to appreciate on art's own terms, because images remain objects of desire regardless of how we understand the protocols that shaped them. The article argues that van den Dorpel is "an unusually clarifying figure" because his work "transcends the split" — it "fuses protocols with form," making "the logics of digital systems into things you can look at, and maybe even desire."

Taste as the through-line

The article reads two decades of practice as a continuous investigation of a single question: what is taste, and can it be formalized? The answer evolves through three stages:

Personal taste: Dissociations

"For several years, the website Dissociations served simultaneously as his online portfolio and a durational artwork through which he trained an algorithm to understand his taste. It would select three elements—images or texts—to populate a page, and van den Dorpel would then eliminate the least coherent item in the trio, teaching the site to display a shifting map of his preferences."

This is the training mechanism of the vault we are working in. The numbered notes are the elements; the "Related" sections encode the associative links the system learned. The artist's role was eliminative: not choosing what to keep, but identifying and removing what didn't cohere. Taste as negative selection — an aesthetic immune system rather than a positive program.

The mechanism resembles assemblage theory's account of emergent identity: not a fixed set of properties but tendencies and capacities that emerge through the history of selections. What the algorithm "knows" about taste is not a list of rules but the accumulated trace of decisions.

Fitness functions as the mechanics of taste

The Spike #70 interview with Tina Rivers Ryan provides the most explicit account of how selection criteria evolve across the series:

Death Imitates Language (2016): manual — the artist decides which specimens live and die
Hybrid Vigor (2017): crowdsourced — the public decides
Nested Exchange (2017): "the hipster algorithm" — each specimen succeeds by being maximally different from all others in the population
Mutant Garden (2019–): complexity of construction (render time) vs. complexity of experience (compressed file size) as dual formal criteria

This is precisely the personal → collective → systemic progression of taste described in the Droitcour article. The interview makes the mechanics explicit: the fitness function is formalised taste. Each version encodes a different theory of what "better" means. The shift from manual to structural is the shift from taste as preference to taste as protocol.

Collective taste: Delinear.info and Mutant Garden Seeder

Delinear.info (2014): "Instead of a linear feed with stable connections between users and their posts, the site presented a drifting assemblage of images and text, whose associative links were both structure and content. When users were online, their avatars hovered as circles over the page, marking the direction their interest."

*Delinear Whiteboards* — the Delinear.info platform materialised as physical whiteboards; associative structure made tangible

This is note 952 ("Script") built into a social platform. That note describes a "cloud" of things whose associations are structure: "Every node has character, partially (but maybe completely) defined by its associations. Identity is deferred." Delinear.info made that deference literal — the associative links were not annotation but the fundamental material of the interface. "While the big platforms were honing their recommendation engines and training users to desire algorithmic predictability, Delinear.info proposed an interface for collaborative collage, where associations remained unstable and expressive."

Death Imitates Language (2016): genetic algorithms generate "software organisms" whose traits mutate through the artist's selection feedback — which works live, die, reproduce. Optimal states are "frozen" and some fabricated as physical objects. Taste becomes a selection pressure, operating evolutionarily rather than intentionally. This is the subconscious computation thesis made concrete: the algorithm runs the logic of taste further than conscious deliberation could; the artist's role is selective, not prescriptive.

Juancar Zolim Juancar — Death Imitates Language — *Juancar Zolim Juancar* (2017) — *Death Imitates Language*; taste as evolutionary selection pressure

Mutant Garden Seeder (2021): collectors join the selection — decentralized authorship in theory. In practice, "collectors caught up in the speculative froth of the NFT market at the time bypassed the interface to mint directly from the contract." The protocol was gamed. Droitcour draws the lesson: "protocols can be gamed as easily as images can be circulated." The design of a system does not determine how it will be used.

Systemic taste: Quantizer

Quantizer (2025): "It makes the underlying rules perceptible as aesthetic material. In doing so, it resolves the tension at the heart of protocol art. The project asks us to judge protocols the way we judge artworks: as expressive, contingent, shaped by decisions and values."

This is the philosophical destination. Taste is no longer just the subject of the system — it is instantiated in the protocol itself as something perceptible, judgeable, desirable.

The Markov question: memory and melancholia

Markov's Window (2004) / Markov's Dream (2022). The Markov chain's defining property: "the next step of a sequence is determined by the current step and not what came before it." A formally memoryless system — each state depends only on the state immediately preceding it, not on the full history.

Yet into this memoryless structure, van den Dorpel embeds the opposite: a trait called "DSM book covers" that imbues iterations with colors and vocabulary from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Melancholia inserted into a system that, by definition, cannot remember what it has lost.

The tension is philosophically precise. Melancholia in psychoanalytic terms is the failure of mourning — the inability to release an attachment to what is lost, the lost object incorporated rather than relinquished. A Markov chain cannot mourn because it has no memory of what was. Embedding melancholia into a memoryless system creates a form of affect that is systemic rather than historical — a permanent atmospheric condition rather than a response to specific loss. The system is melancholic without knowing why.

Permanence of change

Quantizer "insists on the permanence of change" against NFT culture's "obsession with permanent ownership and endlessly replayable imagery." It "lives as a single web page that can be collected but not fixed." It "frustrates the desire for return."

This is the assemblage-identity thesis applied to the digital work: the work's identity is constituted by its history of change, not by any fixed state. To collect Quantizer is not to own a stable object but to hold a position in an ongoing process. "It layers algorithms from different periods of computation to reflect the shifts of history as it embraces the dynamic fluidity inherent to digital media." The dithering algorithms from the 1980s-90s are not nostalgic quotation — they are strata, layers of computational history that the work holds simultaneously.

The contrast with the semiotic square framework is worth noting: the square maps the logical space of positions (New/Old/Same/Different). Quantizer doesn't occupy a position in that space — it insists that change itself is the permanent condition, collapsing the square's terms. You cannot locate it as New or Old because it is never the same twice.

Making protocols desirable

The article's closing claim: van den Dorpel makes protocols "visible, turning the logics of digital systems into things you can look at, and maybe even desire."

Desire is the key word. Desire for images is the baseline; desire for protocols — for the rules and habits that shape aesthetic experience — requires a different kind of attention. What the work teaches is not aesthetic appreciation of images but aesthetic appreciation of systems: the capacity to feel the difference between a platform designed to maximize engagement and a protocol designed to make room for "difference, variation, and choice."

This connects to 709 (artist statement): "Complexity, inconsistency and contradiction do not necessarily call for a solution." The protocol that embraces instability and expressive association over predictability is not a deficient platform — it embodies a different set of values, readable as such.