Share the story of what Open Access means to you
![a graphic of a lock that is open, the universal logo for open access](/assets/oa-lock-logo-lg-a95dd8d9f9fe5e21ab4499ffd0c8661e55f7d788ae0a03f19a6749eb82e3e899.png)
University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.
As for Protocols
Edited by Re’al Christian, Carin Kuoni & Eriola PiraExplicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are systems of language that regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. The first publication to look at protocols across a wide range of disciplines, As for Protocols brings together contributions by twenty-two international artists, writers, scholars, musicians, architects, and scientists who explore protocols across various fields, foregrounding opportunities for creating new protocols that are inclusive and equitable. Through essays, artworks, interviews, and scores, the book speaks to protocols as practice—neither conventional mannerisms nor abstract concepts, but material processes, relational affinities, shared responsibilities, and mutual care.
Edited by Re’al Christian, Carin Kuoni, and Eriola Pira, with contributions by Salome Asega, Carolina Caycedo with Lupita Limón Corrales, Raven Chacon, Jesse Chun, Asia Dorsey, Taraneh Fazeli and Cannach MacBride, Pablo Helguera, Emmanuel Iduma, Mary Maggic, Shannon Mattern, V. Mitch McEwen with Nadir Jeevanjee, Rashaun Mitchell with Silas Riener, Romy Opperman, Rasheedah Phillips, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson with Maria Hupfield, Ultra-red with Robert Sember, and Underground Resistance.
"At a time of intersecting and increasingly alarming global crises, it is incumbent upon us, as differentially positioned artistic researchers, makers, and workers, to reassess our roles and responsibilities in the context of emergent and urgent global crises: our job is not only to ask why art, but which art (forms/practices/commitments) do we offer our energy and life-blood to? As for Protocols, as an edited volume/catalogue as well as archive of almost two years of thinking, making, and debating organized through the Vera List Center, touches on so many of the perspectives, vocalities, and literacies that the project of art attuned to social and ecological justice needs right now. It is wide-ranging, smart, diverse, attentive to constitutive difference, and productive of generative confluence."
—Natalie Loveless, University of Alberta
"As for Protocols is an exciting volume of reflections on the concept or convention we know as protocol—sets of techno-cultural procedures that organize communicative interaction. … In As for Protocols chapters build upon each other; concepts developed in one chapter reappear in subsequent ones efficaciously, providing continuity across projects whose methods and contexts are very different. The writing is consistently accessible and insightful from start to finish.
—Kelli Moore, New York University
Re’al Christian is assistant director of editorial initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. She is the co-editor of Maria Hupfield’s Breaking Protocol, published by the VLC and Inventory Press. She is a contributing editor at ART PAPERS and has written texts for numerous catalogues and anthologies, including Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument 2023), among others.
Carin Kuoni is senior director and chief curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies. She has curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions and is editor or co-editor of ten books, most recently Studies into Darkness: On the Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech and Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change for the Vera List Center and Amherst College Press.
Eriola Pira is a researcher and curator. She is the curator and director of programs at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, where she organizes and co-curates across the center’s programs and initiatives. She has served as editor for Guernica and has guest edited issues of Kosovo 2.0 magazine.
![](/image-service/1831cn73c1723561351/full/full/0/default.png)
- 978-1-943208-98-2 (paperback)
- 978-1-943208-99-9 (open access)