Institut Kunst, the Art School you wish you had applied to! Spearheaded by Head of the Art Institute, Chus Martínez, along with lecturers and a science team, the innovative Institut Kunst is working towards a redefinition of the traditional art school.

The website is not your average .edu. Check it out here and read the welcome text, WE’RE LIVE AND WE WANT TO ELATE by Chus Martínez below.

The site you’re in now is, actually, our mind. You will, of course, find information here about studying with us, and all that entails. This site, however, intends to produce a living climate of materials, texts, and thoughts that define the conditions we work from, within and towards. And who are we? We are a group of teachers, students, visiting artists and collaborators you will find in the section Team.

This site is no blog, as no one writer initiates any conversation with the site’s visitors and there is no one writer initiating the conversation with the viewer / reader. Nor is it an online magazine, as the content is structured without an editorial logic. The site acts as any mind does, feeling a compulsion to get closer to images, materials, ideas, and individuals while simultaneously producing different strategies for doing so. It is not a celebration of incoherence, but an attempt to move away from programmatic thinking.

The name Art Institute names many things. It names a long and complex history of becoming a place where artists teach artists. A place where practice determines thinking, decisions and conversations around the nature of doing in art. The name also names a very specific way of teaching collectively. The Institute has for decades insisted on the radical re-imagining of art academy conventions. The traditional authority-centered classroom structure is replaced by two class formats at the Bachelor and Master levels: the forum and the plenum. Both formats introduce a spatial structure where the artist/students’ minds are at work. Forum and plenum sessions have no subject or theme other than themselves, apart from an intention to investigate the conditions of contemplating artist production today.

And so this site is conceived. It is a place in which several ways of seeing what is happening inside and outside the Institute coincide. The subject – the indexical coherence that defines every form of public presentation or application – is substituted with a flow of investigations that appear, disappear, reappear. This intention is stronger than the will to merely inform you about us. It responds to the creation of an ambiance, a genuine pictorial and thinking climate. Imagine this site as neither project nor blog nor magazine but simply a radiance. A radiance which is the effect of many voices speculating about many things. Do images have an autonomous life when machines can see them, read them, know them as well as the human eye? Are the inherited notions of action and social apparatuses unable to describe how art wants to relate to both human culture and nature? Is a radical reversal in the world of exhibitions possible? Does consciousness present questions art understands better than any other field of knowledge?

The Art Institute pursues a mandate: to probe, question and imagine what the nature of art practice could be on the verge of the next society. Methods appear along this path – they are never there beforehand. Complexity is a substance we embrace.