(Re)Building a Web Presence for the Institute for Infinitely Small Things

Background #

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things conducts creative, participatory research that aims to temporarily transform public spaces and instigate dialogue about democracy, spatial justice and everyday life. The Institute’s projects use performance, conversation and unexpected interventions to investigate social and political “tiny things.”

Active mainly in the mid to late aughts, but still popping up here and there, the group is international, interdisciplinary, and has rotating membership and leadership. Just when you think you’ll never hear from us again, we’ll be back!

Our collective had several websites and online portfolios that documented and archived our work over the years, and in 2025 many had been in a state of disrepair or had been fully down for years. I sought to remedy this, and to create online spaces that allowed for a archive of both the Institute’s work, as well as the umbrella 501c3 that funded many of our projects.

This project consisted of lots of research and scanning of the wayback machine, checking for outdated links and finding potential new ones, reminiscing, and ultimately designing and building three websites, each closely linked to each other in aesthetic feel and content.

An Online Institute Archive #

This website seeks to document and archive all Institute work over the years, with the potential of adding any future projects as well.

The original website had a grid-like feel, which I hoped to recapture, as well as allow a separate space for each project to live and grow.

Learn how the website was built here.

Corporate Commands #

Once of the longest running Institute projects, Corporate Commands was a participatory performance research piece where the Institute for Infinitely Small Things performed corporate commands where they occurred in the urban landscape, trying to perform each command as literally as possible.

A corporate command is an instruction to you, the viewer, in the imperative form. Typically, corporate commands instruct you in abstract modes of being, i.e. “Live Like You Mean It”. The Institute was interested to see what happens when we take this language literally, right where it occurs.

There have been more than 15 performances of corporate commands in the U.S. and Canada in public and private commercial, urban spaces.

When the project was active, there was an online database where people could submit commands they came across in the wild, with suggestions for how they could be performed. Many of the entries have been lost to time, but there is still hope hope that we might be able to recover them all one day.

Read more about the project here.

Learn how the research database was built here.

iKatun #

iKatun (in South Slavic, katun means “temporary village,” and is used to designate seasonal communities near pastures and bodies of water) is the 501c3 that funded many of the Institute’s projects, as well as other projects and events - mainly in the Boston area. Their site had also been down for years, and I decided to revive it, to recall all the cool stuff that iKatun helped make happen, and to also revive the potential for more collaboration in the future.

Learn how the website was built here.

Conclusion #

Questions? Comments? Want to talk about any of these projects? Get in touch!