Lucy Finchett-Maddock is a legal theorist and artist undertaking a two-part artistic research residency responding to Michel Rouleau-Dick’s postdoctoral research project on the topic ‘Warped Mirrors: Statehood in Focus’, investigating the phenomena, possibilities and dangers of digital statehood.
Michel Rouleau-Dick’s research seeks to question the two-pronged question of efficacy and ethics connected to the newly emerging phenomena ‘digital statehood’. The efficacy of which most recently attempted through the small island nation state Tuvalu in the process of digitising itself to remain a sovereign body (as such) once sea levels rise, to which it is so prone. This is alongside the ethical concern for what has been termed ‘The Network State’ giving cryptobros capability to create new forms of state sovereignty beyond the physical, breaking down the division between public and private. Dr Rouleau-Dick has been concerned with this fissure of the abstract from the physical – the landed form of sovereignty and citizenship and an abstracted form that can be manipulated beyond its material realms – for good, but also no doubt for bad.
Lucy is using the residency to collaborate with Michel on the development of new artwork in response to research into digital statehood and sovereignty. The residency will involve working with LLMs to collaborate on questions of sovereignty, property, materiality and abstraction, to understand the ‘edges of sovereignty’ through probing these warped mirrors that no longer reflect the physical reality of the landed nation state, and temper what we mean by sovereignty as a result.