Skip to content

Protocols of Storytelling - Qiufan Stanley Chen

LectureQiufan Stanley Chen
researcheracademic
Protocols of Storytelling - Qiufan Stanley Chen
Open resource →

Stanley Qiufan Chen, author of Waste Tide and co-author with Kai-Fu Lee of AI 2041, teaches a workshop on 'protocols of storytelling,' arguing that meaning in fiction emerges from a shared protocol-space between author and reader—genre conventions, causal layer analysis (Sohail Inayatullah's four layers: litany, systemic causes, worldview, myth/metaphor), and a 'constraint-driven focus' that keeps every narrative choice traceable back to a story's core idea. He guides participants through an iterative 'seed-root-flower-fruit' exercise, using works like The Matrix, Evangelion, and Arrival to show how deep protocols (myth, worldview) are harder to change than surface elements (plot, imagery), and how human-first, AI-assisted co-writing can deepen rather than flatten speculative fiction.

Topics

author-reader-meaning-overlapcausal-layer-analysis-claconstraint-driven-focusfictiongenre-as-protocolmythmetaphor-as-deepest-narrative-layerprotocol-school-2025protocolstechnology

Related resources

Lecture

Protocol Art II - Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer

Primavera De Filippi leads a seminar on protocol art, working through audience case studies (role-playing games, choreography, Yanis Xenakis scores, PostSecret, Pak's Merge/Censored) to test the boundaries between protocol-as-tool, protocol-as-medium, and mere mimetic/meme art. She then presents two archetypal case studies, Oli Plus and Plantoid, analyzing distributed authorship, asynchronous collaboration, DAO-based governance, the limits of copyright versus personality rights, automated royalty systems, community roles, and the temporal/evolutionary nature of protocol-based artworks.

Primavera De Filippi, Felix Beer

Lecture

Designing Trust Protocols, Society, and Web 3.0 - Helena Rong

Helena Rong, assistant professor at NYU Shanghai, previews her spring 2026 course on trust protocols for the agentic web, introducing 'trust experience design' as a framework with three layers—evidence (cryptographic attestations), primitives (verifiable credentials, zero-knowledge proofs), and rituals/experience (signals that make trust felt). She traces trust's evolution from value-based/social forms (handshakes, institutions) to proof-based/technical forms (blockchains, smart contracts), and discusses decentralized AI agents (DeAgents) like Truth Terminal and Sporef.fun as cases of emerging AI self-sovereignty that outpace existing trust protocols like A2A and ERC-8004. The session concludes with a group exercise where participants design trust protocols for near-future scenarios like autonomous mobility, smart grids, and robotic surgery.

Helena Rong

Lecture

Protocol Art I - Primavera De Filippi & Felix Beer

Primavera De Filippi introduces 'protocol art' as a conceptual framework distinguishing autographic works (made directly by the artist) from allographic, protocol-based works where an artist designs rules that others instantiate with their own creative discretion, citing Sol LeWitt, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and Niele Toroni as historical precedents. She traces how blockchain, generative AI, and digital platforms (e.g., her own Plantoids, Olus's voice-cloning project, and Million Dollar Homepage) expand protocol art's design space, and proposes taxonomic axes—atomic vs. systemic, strict vs. fluid, technical vs. social—for classifying works, while fielding audience questions on discretionary space, copyright implications, and genericide of recognizable protocols.

Primavera De Filippi, Felix Beer