Adam Basanta | Book Launch Algorithmic Disobedience
Sporobole is proud to announce the release of Adam Basanta’s Algorithmic Disobedience as part of the exhibition How You Produce Eternity, Soft Collisions Amongst Machines!
For the occasion, the artist will speak with Georges Azzaria, Professor of intellectual property and methodology at the Faculty of Law at Laval University in Quebec City, and Maxime St-Hilaire, Full Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Sherbrooke.
About Algorithmic Disobedience
What if we understood law not as a system of rules, but rather as a computational algorithm ? Or a biological membrane ? Or an artistic medium ? In this book, artist Adam Basanta reimagines law through the lenses of computation, evolution, and art.
Researcher and curator Martin Zeilinger presents a tactical manifesto for artists engaging with generative AI, and legal scholar Maxime St-Hilaire reveals that contemporary art and legal theory may be fundamentally interchangeable.
As AI reveals «points of weakness» in law and artists develop new tactics of resistance, these three perspectives converge on urgent questions: How can we reclaim agency when algorithms disintermediate human processes? What paradigm-shifting work could transform our understanding of law itself? What happens when artists, technologists, and legal thinkers collaborate at the edges of their disciplines?
Published with Juste titre editions, Algorithmic Disobedience is a volume of critical writing and artworks by Adam Basanta that explores the relationship between art and law. By examining how the two fields converge through structural “convertibility” – where law becomes an artistic material or subject, while contemporary art adopts contractual and institutional forms, this book raises questions and redefines the notion of authority and ownership.
Content
In his essay “Unusual Encounters: Law as _,” Adam Basanta proposes four thought experiments that redefine law as an algorithm, as different levels of abstraction, as a virtual interface (or biological membrane), and as an artistic medium. For his part, Martin Zeilinger analyzes how artists can resist the grip of AI companies through tactical practices such as prompt injection and collective drift in a text titled “Toward a Tactics of Disintermediation in AI-Generated Art.” Finally, the reflection at the heart of “Contemporary Art and Law: A Convertibility Beyond Function” by Maxime St-Hilaire explores the structural similarities between law and contemporary art, and suggests that they have become mutually convertible.
Colophon
Direction and Publishing
Vicky Chainey Gagnon, director of artistic programming at Sporobole
Margot Cittone , editor at Juste Titre publishing
Conception and Collaboration
Julie Espinasse, graphic designer at Atelier Mille Mille
Accompagnement à la recherche
Maxime St-Hilaire, Full Professor at the Faculty of Law of University of Sherbrooke and project coordinator
Anne-Sophie Hulin, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Sherbrooke
Alexandra Popovici, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Sherbrooke
Languages
French and english
183 pages
This publication was made possible with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the City of Sherbrooke.
À propos des intervenants
Maxime St-Hilaire (LLB, LLM, LLD, Certificate in Classical Studies) is Full Professor at the Faculty of Law of the Université de Sherbrooke, where he was the principal initiator and coordinator of Adam Basanta’s artist residency in 2024–2025. He teaches and conducts research in constitutional law and legal philosophy, which has led him to examine the conditions of artistic and literary freedom. His publications include Les positivismes juridiques au XXe siècle (Presses de l’Université Laval, 2020; 2nd ed. 2024; Université de Sherbrooke Award for Research and Creation), La lutte pour la pleine reconnaissance des droits ancestraux (Yvon Blais, 2015; Minerve Prize), as well as some thirty articles and book chapters, including two short texts in the contemporary art journal Inter. He currently serves as Director for French-Canada of the Runnymede Society and has been a visiting professor or research fellow at the Louvain Global College of Law, the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, the Paris Sciences Po Law School, the Marc Bloch Centre in Berlin, and the former Centre for Research in Ethics at the Université de Montréal, where he also taught comparative constitutional law as a lecturer. He was an intern with the Venice Commission and a law clerk to the Honourable Marie Deschamps at the Supreme Court of Canada. (Photo : Michel Caron)
Georges Azzaria is a Professor of intellectual property and methodology at the Faculty of Law at Laval University in Quebec City. His early research focused on the relationship between art and copyright, as well as the socioeconomic status of artists. In recent years, he has focused particularly on digital technologies and artificial intelligence, from the perspectives of copyright, privacy, and legal regulation. From 2017 to 2025, he served as director of the School of Art at Laval University.
