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The Cerebral Samba

Protocol Art, Worldbuilding & Our Two Brains

Might we experience reality itself as a protocol and world in a divided brain? Peter Bauman argues protocol art and worldbuilding externalize the brain’s two halves: the protocolic urge to formalize reality into rules and the worlding urge to inhabit it as an open environment.

‍Artists share their minds, making them available for audiences to enter, interpret, even inhabit. What if certain attempts subconsciously mirror the brain itself, the two ways each of us perceives reality?

Wait a minute. The two ways? We only have one brain, pal.

Not according to neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist. For him, the brain is not one unified instrument. It’s a divided system of attention, with each hemisphere feeding us two fundamentally different versions of reality. McGilchrist even refers to them as two brains.

Imagine letting your mind wander in a daydream, an unfocused, global reality stream. Suddenly your phone buzzes and your attention collapses to a tiny point. These are the two brains at work, which I dub the “World Brain” and the “Protocol Brain.”

The daydreamy right hemisphere, our World Brain, is our direct link to the firehose of reality. It sustains a broad, vigilant attention that constantly looks out for the big picture. The World Brain immediately engages with fluid reality, constant motion; everything is connected and nothing is isolated from context. It perceives the world as it is: contradictory, subtle, interconnected, implicit, in motion. The World Brain relishes nuance, is open to possibility.
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The left hemisphere is our Protocol Brain, a reductive map of the messy World Brain’s complexity. The left side is our way of coping with the deluge, simplifying it. The Protocol Brain relies on rules and logic to narrow ambiguity down to certainty. We can’t be constantly drinking from a mental firehose. We ease the burden with shortcuts, models, Ray Dalio-esque principles. The Protocol Brain loves a bulleted list.

Every animal with a two-hemisphered brain performs these two seemingly incompatible operations constantly. The right is our global attention, while the left targets our focus on twigs for nests, feeds of doom an- SQUIRREL!!

So if both are always on and working, involved in everything we do, what’s controlling this back and forth, this cerebral samba?

For McGilchrist, the activation of these two realities doesn't function like an on/off switch. The preference of one over the other operates like a sliding scale. Basically, it depends: one hemisphere becomes more attended to based on the situation. As you sit doing your taxes, you don’t want your right brain chiming in with the philosophical ambiguity of fiat currency while trying to calculate deductions for box 4b.

This connection between the Protocol and World Brains points to the relationship between protocol art and worldbuilding. Like our two brains, they are inextricable. You can’t have one without the other. They work in cranial concert. Some protocols produce loose worlds, some worlds examine protocols and some worlds emerge from loose protocols, examining themselves. The analogy is very left-brained: simplified, imperfect but useful. Protocol art forms resemble the left hemisphere’s appetite for explicit rules, while worldbuilding resembles the right hemisphere’s capacity for ambiguity.

Now picture that on a sliding scale.
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The further left you go, the closer you get to binary rules and protocols, the land of classical computation, where every state resolves to a one or zero and every output traces back to its input. The further right you go, the closer you get to the real world's messiness and gray areas: the land of deep learning, where outputs emerge from weights, and quantum computation, where a bit holds contradiction until observed. As AA Cavia explained to me, software and hardware are themselves drifting rightward, away from the protocols that built them and toward the world-summoning models they increasingly resemble.

The sliding scale of the divided brain, overlapped with technological drift, helps us form a mental slider of the radically different ways artists are making work today, with protocols and worlds.
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Protocol Instantiators

Protocol artists as instantiators in the Primavera De Filippi sense, think Bitcoin, Botto or her own Plantoid, slide more to the left. They use hard-coded rules to create loose, evolving worlds for others to co-construct. The artists hard-code authorial control in future instantiations, for which blockchain is a particularly useful mechanism. As De Filippi sees it, the artist’s “aura” is carried through to subsequent works, a kind of authorial extension, exemplified by her Plantoid, the robotic plant sculptures with a crypto wallet. When they collect enough donations from impressed appreciators, their smart contracts automatically commission human artists to design the next versions of themselves. The human donors vote on the proposals; the winning artist gets paid and a new sculpture is born. The machine hires humans to reproduce itself guided automatically by code. Protocol instantiators emphasize left hemisphere inclinations by design, with rules encoding rules and authorial identity propagating through logic.

De Filippi put it to me: "As a protocol artist, I want as many people as possible to use my protocol to make new instances. But it's never a reproduction; it's a new production. Every instance of the protocol is a new productive work which doesn't reproduce the protocol but instantiates it."
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Protocol Critics

Artists centering critical perspectives on protocols in the Paglen-Herndon-Dryhurst sense, slide more to the middle of the scale. They bring a World Brain perspective to the left's infrastructure, creating loose worlds to critique protocols. Rather than artists authoring rules alone, the critical protocol artist also reveals rules, exposing their material form: that undersea cable, that satellite. Trevor Paglen's ImageNet Roulette took biased categorizations of humans from AI's most widely used training dataset and made them aesthetically visible. Users uploaded selfies and watched the system classify them as "kleptomaniac," “alchy,” "loser." Paglen steps outside the protocols already running our world to expose them and their impacts on our psyche and physical well-being. His method requires right-hemisphere attention to even attempt; you have to hold the whole context to recognize you're inside a system at all.

As Paglen told me, "We find ourselves enmeshed within ever greater numbers of protocols that are doing different things to us. There is nothing in nature that says they have to be the way they are. We can imagine different ways of being within that.”

Worldbuilders

Then we have worldbuilders. These artists slide furthest to the right. They create conditions of emergence from loose protocols rather than strict rules. Where the protocol artists' outputs might surprise but can be understood and back-propped to the rules that describe them, the worldbuilder's worlds are not so easily retraced. Take Jakob Kudsk Steensen's The Song Trapper, in which a mute character travels through four virtual environments stitched from years of Steensen's fieldwork. The four-channel video plays across LED screens shaped like stained glass windows, with the gallery bathed in marsh-green light complete with a custom, watery scent. Layered in is a soundscape mapped onto the architecture itself, transforming the room into an instrument. No single part of the multimodal experience equals the world the inhabitant stands inside. Like the weather, it’s the result of emergent conditions. These artists are thus the least concerned with authorial control, even centering individual authorial death. They tend to fully operate in right hemisphere mode: inside rather than mapping from without.

Steensen described to me the state he's after: “There is a whole process I need to go through so the audience has this daydreamy, floating part of their brain that then connects to an actual environment. There's an interesting play between something structured or technological and an actual world that's being digitized.”
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Like our two-hemispheric brains, Steensen demonstrates how artists use the slider, morphing between logic and daydream depending on the situation. The slider mentality helps to explain the power of protocols and worldbuilding for artists, as Steensen recalls: “I had a show at the Museum of Aarhus in Denmark, where some people sat there for hours, getting in this kind of rhythm with the work as the sound, visuals and scale continuously changed. That's the state I hope people enter."
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If artists like De Filippi build protocols for audiences to instantiate, critics like Paglen reveal protocols for audiences to investigate, and worldbuilders like Steensen construct worlds for audiences to inhabit.

These three practices help answer a pressing question. Why are artists engaging with protocols and worlds in the first place? It goes back to that impulse to share the mind, or state of mind, a most intimate corner of the self.

That means protocol art and its relationship to worlds may point to a better understanding of that fundamental relationship inside every person (and many other living creatures), the two hemispheres of their brains.
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McGilchrist can tell us about our two strange brains with words and text, maybe even a nice diagram, explaining them the best he can.
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But protocol art and worldbuilding take us there, providing space where this division of the dome can be inhabited consciously, shared between people, made into sites of collective meaning-making.

De Filippi, Paglen, Steensen and many others show us the texture, the nuance, the implied spaces of the protocols that run our lives and the worlds we inhabit.

Their efforts bring our attention to the vulnerability of the human condition: our constant bombardment by two very different ways of being in the world that we must always subconsciously strain to navigate.

Art is one of the few domains where we can make visible and demystify this vulnerability, what our brain(s) normally do without us noticing. Protocol art, by making the left hemisphere’s operations and logic into systems for artmaking, makes them knowable, digestible. Worldbuilding reaches for the right hemisphere, prizing the daydream, context and ambiguity, savoring contradictory perspectives.

These art forms help us recognize that reality itself for humans and many animals is a constant navigation between an opaque world and protocol in our very minds. That’s to say nothing of the hidden minds of others. These art forms permit artists to share those externalized-internalizations with audiences, allowing us to become more human by better understanding what’s beyond us, and the dual minds of our one self.



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Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's editor in chief.