The Institute for Words & Pictures
Released May 20th, 2005. CalArts, Valencia

4.15.05 - Dear Reader,
This book is a rare, abandoned artefact of the dreams and traumas that surrounded CalArts during the early 1980s. The Institute for Words & Pictures was mysteriously cancelled at press in March of 1987. The project was abandoned and the original materials were eventually lost. In 2005 an envelope containing most of the lost book pages was found when the building occupied by the printer was demolished. Some pages remain missing.
Uncovered after eighteen years the images in this book tell strange tales: revered and refuted, poetry and fiction, mysteries, detectives and true crimes alike. The first, long delayed, imprint of this lost volume is published in honor of CalArts’ 35th graduating class.

“This long lost volume vividly conjures up the last moments of a simpler era - though it felt complicated enough at the time - of good hope, creative play, uncharted possibility and sometimes profound achievement.”
– Steven D. Lavine, President, Calarts

“The IFW+P ambitiously documents the myth that is CalArts with panache and verve! A heady mix of theory, politics, revelry and debauchery, it perfectly captures the spirit of a school without boundaries, a school where the impossible and improbable co-exist. Lets hope the Institute stays strange for the next few decades of creative dreamers.”
– Michael Worthington (Graphic designer)

“A devastating book. (...) this volume compiles some of the most intriguing heritage from an arts institution whose impact cannot be ignored. (...) A shady history of half-truths in stark black-and-white. (...)”
– Daniel van der Velden (Graphic designer)

"Here we have the prosthetic for the brain: part instruction manual, investigation, map, and landscape (...) IFW&P is an indispensable document that examines existence and yet is a good reason get up in the morning (...) At once immense and immeasuable, this book’s internal geometry celebrates what is uniquely CalArts, prying open your heart to clank around inside."
– Gail Swanlund (Designer, Versifier)

“The IFW+P serves as an irreverent tribute to a new standard of standards. Good, bad, or ugly isn’t the point. Trying everything is.”
– Louise Sandhaus (Director, Graphic Design Program, CalArts)

“What Kyes and Fisher have accomplished is to put together an astonishing and unprecedented assemblage of the multiple ways in which Calarts has been used, or been conceptualized, in relation to reality. The Institute for Words & Pictures is a continuous revelation.”
– Christine Wertheim (Poet, [p]rofessor of Visual Arts and Literature, CalArts)