Other Projects

Other OICR inaugural projects focus on issues that range from innovative housing solutions to the development of new research protocols for the 21st century.  The Institute sponsors two major prizes meant to catalyze widespread discussion, debate, and action on major issues.  The Hannah Arendt Prize in Creative Research has been run twice since 2013, each time eliciting entries from artists, writers, scientists, and humanists from 34–35 countries around the globe.  (For more information, please see the section entitled “Prizes.”)  We aim to run the first annual competition of the Prehistoric Bee Society beginning Fall 2017.

A number of our projects are influenced by the movement known in the art world as “relational aesthetics,” which, put simply, entails the active, conscious creation of models for living in full recognition of the immense challenges and ethical quandaries posed by the contemporary world.  Thus, the OICR aims not only to create, develop, and test out new models for the transmission of knowledge and know-how but also new models for living in the 21st century.  All of our endeavors can be said to be based on the realization that simply raising awareness of the massive challenges that face us (foremost among them, political upheaval, ecological catastrophe, and radical uncertainty) in the form of information, whether statistics or data visualization, has proven completely inadequate, for the challenge is rather different—it is to make this information real so that the urgency of the situation can be understood, fathomed, and acted upon.