CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2026

PROTOCOL: PERFORMING BODIES

The 2026 Critical Legal Conference takes place at a moment of institutional unravelling and re-composition. Humanities at large, including the arts and most attempts at novel interdisciplinarity, are at heightened risk from the neoliberal and increasingly totalitarian state machine, with creative production increasingly bypassed as irrelevant, controlled or simply banished.

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We invite you to think of embodied and emplaced ways of resisting such a tendency, actively employing the conference bodies in performance art, spatialised workshops, movement sessions and any other form of embodiment that can help create new and much-needed protocols for being and becoming. 

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All bodies are, in some way or another, performing. We understand performing bodies as embodied and spatialised encounters that both defy and construct protocols; bodies that challenge normativities and generate new ones. We understand performing bodies as the main way in which protocols can be construed in an inclusive and necessary way, thereby redistributing power, responsibility, value and legitimacy in fairer ways.

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Digital technologies – AI systems, blockchain infrastructures, platforms, NFTs, standards, and automated decision-making architectures – are actively introduced into arts and humanities. But this means the ontology of the performing body and its encounters are changing radically. The embodied technological posthumanism of performing bodies distribute authority, challenge established rules, create opportunities for diffused decision-making, and shape different futures.

In this context, protocols are not merely standardised procedures, fixed rulebooks or technical scripts. More fundamentally, protocols refer to distributed conditions of encounter, with or without stable institutional anchors. Protocols are formally minimal yet normatively dense: they establish the parameters and conditions of coordination – such as thresholds, triggers, endpoints, roles, and relations – through which distribution, automation, consensus, delegation, command and collaboration can take place. Protocols are operational, provisional, iterable, often opaque, and increasingly function as the infrastructure of social, economic and political life.

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Performing bodies de-mystify protocols by going deep into protocol production, upsetting the usual techniques, or even adding a layer of mystification that is creative, experimental, risk-taking but ethical, fleeting yet impactful.
 
The conference approaches normativity as ontological: not simply as a set of rules imposed from above, but as something that emerges through relations between bodies, technologies, institutions, imaginaries, and material conditions. Protocols perform cuts into this wider field of normativity, temporarily stabilising particular ways of living together – while foreclosing others. 

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As law’s traditional formats lose their monopoly, normativity itself becomes a frontier space: something to be captured, automated, designed, contested, or collectively reimagined. We invite you to come up with ways in which your and our performing bodies are put to work to create new, fairer protocols of movement and pause for new, radical legal production. 

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Every stream can include any mode of participation (performing bodies, proof of concept, works of text). For sessions employing the performance mode, we invite:​​