The Office of Rules and Norms  

Exploring the role of art in revealing and challenging existing rules

2019 –

Partners
Concordia University

The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is an arts-based transdisciplinary studio headquartered in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University. The Office engages with regulations, the rule of law, cultural norms and market standards. These engagements reveal, comprehend, play with, subvert, and transcend current ways of understanding and acting in relation to regulatory forces in order to make room for more equitable alternatives. In its attempts to query legal and behavioural urban infrastructures, the ORN specifically deploys art and design practice, culture, and methods along three axes:

• Art as Subversion | Intervening in grey areas of regulation
• Art as Pedagogy | Making public various forces and forms of influence
• Art as Decision-Making | Reorienting modes of knowing and deliberating

Initial projects launched in Autumn 2019 explore grey areas of the building code, socially-biased regulations, the voices of future generations and real estate speculation. One of them, Excess and the City, is a course in which participants will investigate and develop new art methodologies to reveal the systems underlying speculation and excessive cities. Excess and the City examines the complex financial, political and social schemes that produce increasingly unaffordable cities, and explore the potential of subversion in finding alternatives to speculation.

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