International Arts & Technologies: Global approaches to creative innovation.
British Council Team: Annah Andrews & Aurora Hawcroft.
HA: What is
Regulatory Art?
PC:
Regulatory Art is a broad term for art that integrates legal regulations within artistic projects. Socially-engaged artists aim to foster social change, they intervene directly into the decline of justice and welfare. This is the drive of artists who inform, envision, and advocate for new and better regulations that can produce positive change in society. In such a way, regulation itself becomes a material for art making. Governance —its design, principles, and implementation—is a creative process in which artists can be naturally active in imagining and forming. The historical engagement of artists in the idea of Utopia is the most evident example. It’s often said that the law and regulations are slow and too antiquated to catch up with technological developments. Often tech companies take advantage of that, introducing new technology without questioning its legality and playing within the gray areas of the law. Art can operate in similar ways, quickly and powerfully beyond the boundaries, but with different aims. Art challenges the use and perception of technology to immediately show the hidden dark sides. Artists can investigate and inform about technology in unique ways, and they ask important questions to which they can provide answers. That is how artists can include creative regulatory advocacy to rein in the abuses and dangers of technology.
HA: Why is artistic practice a powerful tool for developing governance and regulation of advanced technologies?
PC: Artists who work with technology through a research based and social approach are deeply immersed in the field and can provide unique insights. Other professionals—such as technologists, academics, lawyers, or commentators—often don’t have a holistic approach and are specialists in only particular fields related to technology, to which they apply canonical methodologies of research. Instead, artists approach the field creatively, offering new ways of seeing and engaging with technology. In particular, they often gain deeper insight into the social interactions and consequences that technology generates. They are not detached from those realities or talking about them abstractly. Instead, artists open the black boxes, they play with them unexpectedly, and they study how society is affected by them in new ways that weren’t yet possible or were downplayed. That’s why artists with this approach are then experts who can propose policy and regulations; they can do so with much more freedom and imagination compared to who has to follow what the slow and limited legal systems can provide.
HA: Can you share an example of tech policy—government or industry—that has changed as a result of artistic intervention?
PC: I worked on a number of projects in which I proposed regulations. Art doesn’t directly change policy; it’s rather a collective struggle with many activists, journalists, human rights lawyers, and civil society that together help to push for regulations. As an artist, my role is to inspire, show the in visible, galvanize audiences, and imagine possible realities. In some cases, I successfully managed to organize for these outcomes also by engaging with many stakeholders. An example is the banning of facial recognition technology in Europe, which happened only recently with the AI Act regulation. In that case, my petition had over fifty thousand signatures, and I received large press coverage through an art intervention in Paris. The European Commission answered me directly, thanking me for promoting such regulation they were working on. Also, my project
Obscurity, which aimed to bring the privacy policy “Right to Be Forgotten” to the United States, took me years of advocacy. With it, I created broad awareness, and legislators took it as an example for passing bills. Another example could be when the US Patent Office established an ethics committee for AI, after I exposed thousands of problematic technologies with the project
Sociality. These might be indirect positive change, but they are all connected to my artistic and activist work. I also worked on content moderation regulation, in particular
on Instagram with the artwork Attention and
X (Twitter) with the campaign BAN X in EU. These relate to freedom of speech, which requires a new philosophical understanding of it, and so my role as artist is even more necessary. Also in these cases, I worked with lawyers and activist groups to highlight the need to enact and enforce these regulations, which the EU recently passed with the DSA. Working in these fields always brings me to the forefront of technological development. For instance, now I’m working on Quantum Computing regulations, and I am again one of the very few discussing it, hopefully being agile and creative enough to address policy questions before they even arise.
