Editorials

Painter Avery Singer is exhibiting a new canvas, Vanessa (2026), at the Protocol Art show, Strange Rules, in Venice. The artist spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about her accidental path to painting and the recent integration of custom AI workflows into her practice. They discuss slop aesthetics, the dopamine blowout of contemporary image consumption, and how Baudrillard's theories of spectacle inform Singer’s long use of technology to interrogate the changing nature of image production.

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, living environment.

Data artist Shohei Fujimoto produces site-specific, data-driven perceptual installations. The artist spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the primitive structures underlying human perception, how the body remembers space, and whether simulated realities can ever fully replicate physical experience. Fujimoto is exhibiting at Personal Structures in Palazzo Mora alongside the Venice Biennale (May 9–November 22, 2026).

Jane Veeder began her career in electronic media arts in 1976 and became a member of the pioneering Chicago computer graphics community and EVL. Her computer-animation Montana (1982) is part of MoMA's video collection. Veeder spoke with her longtime friend from the Chicago new media scene, Copper Giloth, as well as Peter Bauman. They cover her path from ceramic sculpture to analog video with Phil Morton to real-time computer animation. Veeder's interactive experiments on the Zgrass machine's repurposed video game hardware anticipated by decades the game-engine-driven world-building that now anchors major museum collections and biennials.

Post-internet artist Ed Fornieles spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony), exploring how ecosystems and emergent systems underpin his practice. They cover the post-internet generation's legacy, models of human-AI collaboration and art as human sacrifice, a person dedicating their life to what they make.

AI scientist, researcher and artist Aaron Hertzmann spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony), arguing that AI can automate certain tasks but that true authorship remains a human social construct rooted in personal relationships and agency. They cover the enduring question of whether machines can make art, AI’s historical analogies from photography to streaming, and what is genuinely new about this moment.