Talk

It Follows: Rules as Art

"Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art." — Claude Debussy

What connects the life of a Benedictine monastery to the evolution of Large Language Models? Or the latest developments in game theory to the score-based works of artists such as Yoko Ono or Ghislaine Leung? In this lecture, Professor Mike Sperlinger will argue that all of them are part of a contested history of rules and rule-following, which thought together might suggest other ways of negotiating our algorithmic present.

Drawing on the work of the historian of science Lorraine Daston, as well as philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Giorgio Agamben, this lecture will briefly sketch how radically rules as a social form have been transformed in recent western history and what implications this might have for artistic practice.

In particular, it will focus on some examples of forms of artistic practice which take rules themselves as their medium, and speculate about what we might be able learn from these works about rules as a form of collective life.

This public lecture is part of the course ‘Rules and Scores: Art and Beyond’, being held between the Fine Art and Dance departments in April 2026.