5pm 24 September 2026

Book Launch
Self-Institution/ Terminology Audit
Gary Farrelly, Fiona Hallinan & Kate Strain

International
Centre for
the Image

Book Launch
Self-Institution/ Terminology Audit
Gary Farrelly, Fiona Hallinan & Kate Strain

Join the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (Gary Farrelly) and the Department of Ultimology (Fiona Hallinan, Kate Strain) to celebrate the launch of Self-Institution/ Terminology Audit, published by Set Margins’.

Self-Institution/ Terminology Audit (Set Margins’) is a collection of profiles and lexicons documenting artistic practices that operate as self-declared institutions. It examines the act of self-institution as both a conceptual and operational approach, focusing on how these practices structure themselves and engage with their contexts.

Initiated by the O.J.A.I., this publication grew out of an ongoing, multi-year research and editorial project, bringing together fourteen invited practices. The publication investigates artist offices, bureaus, departments, ministries, societies, centres, and other explicitly institutional invocations. The Terminology Audit reveals language and jargon unique to each practice. The case studies, currently active in the field, represent a broad range of approaches, including research-based, performance-driven, pragmatic, materially motivated, counter-institutional, esoteric, and absurd facsimiles of institutionhood.

Gary Farrelly presents the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.), the para-intelligence agency he founded with Chris Dreier in 2015, as a point of departure for introducing Self-Institution / Terminology Audit, the book they initiated and co-edited. Drawing on a decade of O.J.A.I.. activity, Farrelly presents the Office as an enactment of self-institution: the construction of protocols, vocabularies, identities and permissions through which collaborative practice can operate. Self-Institution/ Terminology Audit opens this method onto a wider field, bringing together artist offices, societies, centres, ministries, departments, schools and bureaus to examine the diverse forms self-institution can take, spanning satire, activism, material obsession, research, and speculative pedagogy.

Fiona Hallinan and Kate Strain present The Department of Ultimology – one of the profiles featured in the book. The Department of Ultimology is a practice for paying attention to endings. Ultimology proposes the study of endings as a real and urgent concern; it suggests through looking closely at things that are extinct, endangered, vulnerable or at risk in the present, we might learn new lessons of care and consideration, or at least understand how to better negotiate loss. The Department was established in 2016 at Trinity College Dublin by Kate Strain and Fiona Hallinan, where a sample of invited interlocutors were asked the question “what is ending in your field or discipline, what is dying out?”. This interview process led to a series of artistic interventions across the university, as well as to the production of new commissions in broader artistic contexts (from radio essays, to films, installations and workshops). In 2025 Hallinan completed a doctoral research project that sought to inform and disclose Ultimology as a methodology of accompaniment through an investigation of practices of attending to the death of human individuals and its application to case studies of endings. Currently the department is active between Aughrim and Brussels.

Book Launch and Talk
Self-Institution/ Terminology Audit
Gary Farrelly, Fiona Hallinan & Kate Strain

Launch
5pm Thursday 24 September 2026

Entry
Free Event – Booking required