Outer Institute

The Outer Institute
(for critical, durational, and
typographic post-studio practices)

The Outer Institute is dedicated to increasing access to opportunities for critical, sustainable learning and conversations across design and contemporary art. Through expansive programming that includes typography workshops, inter-disciplinary seminars, in-depth discussions, critique of participant work and public exhibitions, structured dialogues, self-directed studies, and partnering with mutually aligned arts, cultural, and educational organizations, the Outer Institute offers rigorous, accessible opportunities for continued learning, with an emphasis on gathering and sharing resources, as well as identifying a wide variety of exemplary, publicly accessible offerings involving image, typography, (infra)structure, time, space, pedagogy, archives, and language.

Exploring the potentials of unaccredited, non-terminal post-secondary education, the Outer Institute is focused on examining the gaps, grey areas, relationships, and common boundaries between these concerns, as well as their connection to broader questions and circumstances. Drawing upon the tools, processes, histories, and critical discourses of design, typography, and contemporary art, the Outer Institute is also a forum for inquiry into the processes, possibilities, and complications of higher education and its attendant structures and systems.

Through an ongoing assembly of resources, discussions, workshops, classes, and an ever-growing community of participants and collaborators, the Outer Institute is at once concrete and ephemeral, durable and de-materialized. While not a "program" in a traditional, credit-bearing sense, it continually asks what programs and programming are and could be.

The Outer Institute invites all who are engaged in expanding the spectrum and depth of their practices, developing the critical tools necessary to navigate and articulate the paradoxes and contradictions around them, and finding the formal means and contextual situations to convey these explorations.

Purpose

Offering an approach to thinking through and making work rooted in historical and contemporary practices and theories of both graphic design and contemporary art, the Outer Institute is dedicated to creating opportunities and compiling resources for self-directed research, critique, conversation, cross-pollination, and expansion along and between continua of critical, durational, and typographic post-studio practices. We seek participants with integrative and transdisciplinary approaches and backgrounds who are interested in interweaving discourses of 20th and 21st century art, media, graphic design, literature, and critical theory.

The aim of the Outer Institute is to expand and deepen the practices of those who engage with it, and provide opportunities for ongoing and continued learning analogous to graduate-level study, removed from the private investment and speculation of the student loan industry.

The organization offers various scaffolds for practice-based, research-driven learning, and functions as a supplement to other institutions and engagements with which participants may be currently or previously involved. Participants work primarily on self-directed projects under consultation with resident faculty and in conversation and collaboration with one another.

Context:

Committed to activating and exploring the points of contact between disciplines and media, and creating a space for extended development, exposure, and conversation, without the heavy debt burden that often accompanies such study, the Outer Institute exists in response to several gaps that we perceive in the current landscape of higher education:

a gap in dialog between departments and discourses at existing institutions of all sizes
a lack of programs that actively integrate strategies and pedagogy from both graphic design and post-conceptual art
a need for more opportunities that enable and encourage rigorous and sustained study and practice without incurring long term debt.
a lack of institutions in which faculty are paid fairly and sustainably for their contributions.

Community Involvement:

The Outer Institute offers a range of programming that is free and open to the public, including lecture series, screenings, and public discussions.

Resources:

The institute operates with little in the way of property or equipment. This enables an efficiency and a focus on education itself, at a cost that is many degrees of magnitude lower than traditional, accredited programs. Los Angeles is a city of numerous research institutions, libraries, and other accessible resources, of which we encourage people to actively avail themselves.