The Institute of the Mechanical Surround

The Institute of the Mechanical Surround (IMS) is a production studio, a label, and a workspace for experimental collaborations between scholars, musicians, and artists. The IMS is here to identify, measure, and evaluate conditions of technological saturation. Celebrating knowledge in terms of sonic intervention, lyricism, and aesthetic wager, the IMS is here for you.

The Institute of Mechanical Surround is a hub for asking new questions concerning technology and producing new genres through which to answer them. In generating a more nuanced and more pleasurable understanding of technological saturation, each node of IMS programming operates as a bridge between scholarly inquiry, artistic pursuit, and the wider community. The IMS seeks to reimagine the ends of art and means of intellect.

Founded in 2023 with a sense of urgent concern, the IMS will recalibrate your senses of and appreciation for the machines that make you up, bring you down, and otherwise mediate your mere human existence. Located aside the campus of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, the IMS was founded by John Modern and Nick Kroll in 2023. With a network of collaborators that spans continents, intellectual disciplines, and artistic practice, IMS takes up the question of what is happening now.

Drawing from our collective expertise in philosophy and history, social theory, socially engaged art, turntablism and electronic music, the IMS is animated by what is perhaps the most pressing humanistic concern of our time: technological saturation. For we find ourselves in a world that, in so many ways and on so many levels, is bent on integrating whatever might be a defining characteristic of the human— cognition, creativity, indeterminacy, imagination, sociality, flourishing, empathy, love, rationality—with machines.