The Institute of (im)Possible Subjects
Project Description
This collective aims to construct a knowledge commons through and about media and technoscapes, framed by women’s voices and experiences.
The Institute of (im)Possible Subjects (IiS) is a transnational feminist collective of artists, writers, and researchers. The collective opens multiple spaces and modalities for learning and knowing, including artists’ projects, visual and sound experiments, in-person guest lectures, public workshops, video installations and screenings, as well as online experiments in participatory knowledge sharing and annotation. IiS has been working together collaboratively since 2013 on scholarly, artistic, and educational endeavors, with an emphasis on engaging and sharing transnational feminist and im/migrant perspectives across disciplines, institutions, and global territorial boundaries.
The collective pursues questions like:
- What are the relationships between digital spaces and global racialism/racism, gender, and labor politics?
- How do we trans nationally exchange visual cultures and social justice through media and technoscapes?
- In what ways could contemporary artists and researchers intervene to (re)define landscapes of knowledge?
Primary Researchers

Dalida María Benfield
Director
Research and Programs
Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research, United States
Project Posts
Critical Algorithm Studies: Ethnographic Approaches
Upcoming PhD symposium features anthropologist and STS scholar Nick Seaver, talking about Critical Algorithm Studies. Register now for this May 27, 2019 symposium!
‘Recoding Art: Van Abbemuseum Collection’ premiere at “Bodies of Knowledge” symposium
BioBruno MoreschiBruno Moreschi is a researcher and artist with projects related to the deconstruction of complex systems, among them the visual arts, especially their physical and virtual spaces of legitimation. He has a PhD in Visual Arts at Unicamp (State...
/Living in/ A Methodology of Transgressiveness/
What’s the value of transgressiveness? The Skagen Institute annual conference offers opportunities you never thought you needed. Jannek Sommer offers a small riff in this post.
Speculating with predictive memory-making: The (Black) Box of Memories
At EASST, we used speculative science-fiction to think about current and future algorithms for memory-making. Through a fictional story and its analysis, we discuss the “black-box” metaphor, the business/entrepreneurial aspect of algorithms, and the conception of predictive memory-making.
Glitch Memory: Raising Ethical Questions
At Godsbanen, we retell a woman’s story, one year after she donated her memory to MoRM. On three screens, excerpts and meta-conversations are mutated and glitched algorithmically to raise questions about data degradation and the illusion of the representational archive.
The Sound of Forgetting: Improvisation, experimentation and bricolage
(This blogpost is part of a series of that will be posted in the six days leading up to the Museum of Random Memory: The Sound of Forgetting, happening in Cardiff/UK and Cork/Ireland. See all blogposts in the series.) Over two days (21-22 May 2018), the Museum of...