The Idle Institute (established in 2017) is a storytelling lab: a collective of writers, filmmakers, sound-artists and engineers founded by Sonia Bernac, Eliot Allison, and Bruno Klopott. Combining theories of the public sphere with quantum physics, they investigate the potentialities of the story – seen as virtual matter and a precise political tool. This emerges from the presumption of an unstable narrative field, in which they examine unexpected couplings and clashes between narrative particles. The Idle Institute’s projects build from narrative experiments: poetic traps in urban space, phone pranks, impersonation games and sci-fi installations. Currently developing a theory of the narratology of the public sphere, their research explores narrative entanglement, machine(s) of writing and technologies of storytelling.
They cheat occasionally, but only when it makes a good story…