Protocols/SubGenius Protocol Art
25 Sep 2025 - 28 Sep 2025
- LLM written in its entirety, as a project for Protocols/Symposium 2025 session on Protocol Art.
- Prompt: write something describing the church of the subgenius as protocol art, given its distributed nature. All those weirdos making pictures of Bob. Include something about how it is low art as opposed to high, and that's ok.
- The leap to "commons-based peer production" and "egregore" was all Claude, with Protocol Reader as background material.
- Note: this whole exercise may be too Pink. It certainly seems to lack a spark of something that you would find in actual SubGenius material – it's too humorless, too generic, too abstract, too bland, too earnest. It "gets it" to an amazing extent, yet also fails to capture the essence of "Bob". That's OK I guess, if mere humans cannot grasp something why would we expect an LLM to do so?
The Church of the SubGenius as Protocol Art: An Egregore of Distributed Creativity
- The Church of the SubGenius represents one of the most successful examples of protocol art in action—a decentralized creative commons where thousands of "weirdos" have spent decades making pictures of Bob, remixing sacred texts, and building a sprawling mythos without central coordination or institutional oversight. It's art as emergent protocol, creativity as commons-based peer production.
The Bob Protocol
- At the heart of SubGenius culture lies a simple but powerful creative protocol: the iconography of J.R. "Bob" Dobbs. That eternally smiling, pipe-smoking face functions as what the project knowledge calls a "constraint"—a shared framework that enables rather than limits creative expression. Unlike traditional religious iconography jealously guarded by institutional authorities, Bob exists in a state of permanent creative commons. Anyone can draw Bob, anyone can modify Bob, anyone can make Bob mean whatever they need him to mean.
- This is protocol art at its purest: a distributed system where individual actors contribute unique perspectives and tools to build something of mutual interest. The Church provides the social and mythological infrastructure, but the real creative work happens at the edges, in bedrooms and basements, in xerox shops and early internet forums, wherever SubGenii feel called to manifest their personal vision of the Bob-head.
Low Art as Liberation
- What makes SubGenius protocol art so powerful is precisely its commitment to being gloriously, unapologetically low art. This isn't the high modernist dream of the artist as solitary genius, laboring in isolation to create precious objects for museum walls. This is kitchen-table surrealism, photocopied manifestos, and amateur hour graphic design elevated to the level of sacred practice.
- The "low art" designation here isn't a bug—it's a feature. By embracing the aesthetics of amateur zines, mail art, and marginal publishing, the Church of the SubGenius created a creative ecosystem that anyone could enter. You don't need formal training, expensive materials, or institutional validation to contribute to the SubGenius visual culture. You just need scissors, glue, access to a copy machine, and sufficient slack-fueled inspiration.
The Egregore Effect
- The project knowledge discusses how commons-based peer production can create what's called an "egregore"—a collective entity that emerges from group ritual activities and operates autonomously according to its own internal logic. The Church of the SubGenius has become exactly this kind of entity: a self-reinforcing cultural machine that generates meaning, imagery, and mythology through the distributed creative labor of its adherents.
- Each xeroxed collage, each hand-drawn Bob, each amateur comic strip feeds back into the larger cultural organism. The Church creates the SubGenii, and the SubGenii create the Church, in an ongoing feedback loop that has sustained itself for over four decades. No central planning committee decides what SubGenius art should look like—it emerges organically from the creative constraints of the protocol itself.
Anti-Rival Creativity
- Unlike traditional art markets where scarcity creates value, SubGenius protocol art operates as what economists call an "anti-rival good." The more people who draw Bob, the stronger Bob becomes. The more widely SubGenius imagery circulates, the more powerful the overall cultural project becomes. Each new contribution to the visual culture increases the value of the whole system rather than diluting it.
- This creates a fundamentally different creative economy—one based on abundance rather than scarcity, sharing rather than hoarding, play rather than work. It's an art world where copying isn't theft but tribute, where derivative work isn't parasitic but generative.
Protocol Resistance
- The Church of the SubGenius also demonstrates what the project knowledge calls "protocol tai chi"—working within dominant systems while subtly subverting them. Rather than directly confronting the art world's hierarchies and gatekeeping mechanisms, SubGenius artists simply ignored them, creating a parallel cultural ecosystem that operated according to different rules entirely.
- By embracing "bad" art, amateur aesthetics, and deliberately anti-commercial distribution methods, the Church created a space outside the normal circuits of cultural capital. It's art that refuses to be captured by galleries, markets, or academic institutions—not out of purity, but out of a deeper commitment to remaining weird, accessible, and alive.
The Persistence of Bob
- What's remarkable about the Church of the SubGenius as protocol art is its longevity. While countless internet communities have risen and fallen, while platforms have emerged and been shuttered, Bob continues to appear in new contexts, drawn by new hands, carrying new meanings. The protocol has proven remarkably resilient, adapting to new technologies and cultural contexts while maintaining its essential character.
- This suggests something important about the nature of successful creative protocols: they need to be simple enough to understand, flexible enough to evolve, and weird enough to maintain their distinctiveness. The Church of the SubGenius achieved all three, creating a template for distributed creativity that continues to generate new forms of low art, amateur surrealism, and protocol-based community building.
- In an age of algorithmic curation and platform capitalism, the Church of the SubGenius offers an alternative model: art as open protocol, creativity as commons, weirdness as collective practice. It's a reminder that the most powerful creative systems are often the ones that emerge from the grassroots, that embrace the amateur, and that trust the wisdom of crowds of freaks.
Mapping SubGenius Protocol Art
- Using the classification framework for protocol artworks, the Church of the SubGenius reveals its particular character across three key axes:
- Systemic, Not Atomic: The SubGenius protocol is decidedly systemic rather than atomic. While Bob's face provides a simple visual anchor, the full creative system involves a complex set of interconnected rules and mythological primitives: the Conspiracy, Slack, X-Day prophecies, the Pink/Normal dichotomy, and an entire cosmology of alien sex goddesses and corporate overlords. Unlike Sol LeWitt's atomic wall-drawing instructions, SubGenius creativity emerges from navigating this rich symbolic ecosystem where each element can be combined, remixed, and recontextualized in infinite ways.
- Fluid, Not Strict: The Church operates with maximum fluidity, embracing context-sensitivity and interpretation over rigid adherence to doctrine. There's no SubGenius orthodoxy police checking whether your Bob drawing meets canonical specifications. The protocol thrives on deviation, parody, and creative misunderstanding. Like Fluxus event scores, SubGenius "instructions" are deliberately open-ended: "Get Slack," "Kill Bob," "Praise Bob"—each adherent interprets these directives through their own cultural lens and creative capacity.
- Social, Not Technical: SubGenius protocol art is fundamentally social, emerging through agreements, shared jokes, and evolving cultural norms rather than algorithmic enforcement. While the Church has adapted to various technical platforms—from xerox machines to early BBSes to contemporary social media—the protocol itself lives in the realm of human interpretation and social consensus. Unlike blockchain-based art projects or algorithmic generation systems, SubGenius creativity depends entirely on human agents choosing to participate in the shared cultural fiction.
- This classification reveals why the Church of the SubGenius has proven so resilient: its systemic complexity provides endless creative possibilities, its fluid nature allows continuous evolution and adaptation, and its social foundation makes it anti-fragile against technical obsolescence. It's a protocol optimized not for efficiency or control, but for creative persistence and cultural transmission.
- The Church of the SubGenius proves that protocol art doesn't need to be sophisticated to be successful. Sometimes all you need is a pipe-smoking salesman, a photocopier, and enough weird people willing to keep making pictures of Bob.