Art of Rules

Is it possible to make art out of a complicated set of regulations?

"Art of Rules" is an artwork about complex regulatory frameworks — more precisely the EU's framework for the union's carbon emissions, the EU ETS. But the work also communicates an artistic method of inquiry in which science and art flow into one another toward new horizons. Regulations both bind together and shut out. This is clear in the framework we have worked with — the EU's trading system for greenhouse gas emissions, which on the one hand connects all activities of a certain kind within a certain area. On the other hand they are detached from other activities and from other geographies. We were fascinated by the precision of the framework's wording, and the impossibility of geographically delimiting the emissions themselves. And by the incomprehensibility — the simple basic ideas, and the unforeseeable consequences. Through this framework a trading system is created that allows for game-theoretical considerations — that is, that one actor's actions will determine the outcome of another actor's actions. This is one reason the framework becomes hard to grasp, and that in turn leads to another aspect we are interested in — the relationship between the comprehensibility of regulations and democracy.

In long opening discussions we considered the possibility of making art out of regulations, and if so why and in what format. By choosing to make this work in the form of an animated film, we were able to play with the connection between word and image, where the words at times lie closer to the regulations themselves, while the images, on the other hand, can give richer associations to their physical consequences.

Knowledge for the artwork was gathered partly through studio conversations with artists and experts on the emissions trading system. From these conversations we further distilled ideas and associations in both text and image and joined them together. Parts of the text and image were at first almost literary, then gradually pared down, thereby opening them up to the viewer's own interpretations.