The Institute of Mechanical Surround is a hub for asking new questions concerning technology and producing new genres through which to answer them.

Founded in 2023, and 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. Our projects are designed to provoke scholars to reimagine what they are doing and for whom. And they are designed to appeal to an array of publics to become more interested and invested in the questions we are asking.

The IMS pushes academic conversations about science and technology in new directions. Our past projects include the Machines in Between podcast, the immersive experience of The Vinyl Church, the socially engaged pedagogical space of Mixtape Metaphysics, events featuring leading scholars in religion and philosophy, an audio essay about AI mimicry, and podcast miniseries on techno-philosophy. These projects have set a new standard for what public scholarship might sound and feel like and how big questions might be staged in innovative ways.  

Future activities will continue to take up the question of what is happening now. 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— rationality, creativity, interpretation, mourning, sociality, freedom, empathy, and love—with the future of machines. What is to be done as we grow entangled with large language models, their economies, and their myths and increasingly enchanted by the promise of automated cognition?

Drawing from our collective expertise in philosophy and history, social theory, immersive experiences, 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.