On Pedagogy, Institutions, and Speculative Frameworks
I’m Edgar Fabián Frías, a multidisciplinary artist, educator, psychotherapist, and brujx based in Los Angeles. In a recent two‑part CAA Conversations series with my brilliant collaborator Lineadeluz (Darleen Martínez)—“Performing Knowledge: Pedagogy, Institutions, and Speculative Frameworks”—we invited listeners to sit with a simple but charged question: How do institutions feel in your body?
If you’d like to journey with us more deeply, I encourage you to watch the YouTube versions of both episodes or listen to the original podcast on the College Art Association website. The blog entry here traces some of the key threads from my perspective and extends them into a broader reflection on pedagogy, institutional power, and the digital as a trickster technology.
Feeling Institutions in the Body
In the first episode, I share how the word “institution” lands in me as contraction, vigilance, and, very plainly, trauma. As a queer, non‑binary, Indigenous (Wixárika), Latinx person, my memories of educational and art institutions are full of mixed feelings: I’ve grown and found community within them, and I’ve also experienced profound erasure, extraction, and dislocation.
When we ask listeners how institutions feel in their bodies, we are asking them to register institutions not only as buildings or systems, but as sensations: tight shoulders, shallow breathing, the impulse to code‑switch, the need to “shrink” oneself to survive a space. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on performativity, I’m interested in institutions as something we do together—repeated acts, rituals, and scripts that solidify into what seems natural or inevitable.
In that sense, institutions are performances: they enact inaccessibility, neutrality, and authority, while those of us inside them perform legibility, respectability, and strategic self‑erasure. Naming that dynamic is, for me, the first step in transforming it.
Digital Art, Illegibility, and the Knowledge Gap
A major theme across both episodes is the persistent illegibility of digital art within many academic and museum environments. I talk about my time teaching at a major university, where students were excited to work with digital media—video, social platforms, online collaborations—only to have those practices treated as unserious, “too easy,” or a sign that they weren’t growing as artists.
For me, this isn’t only about taste or medium; it’s about which communities and knowledges institutions are willing to recognize. Digital spaces are where many queer, trans, Indigenous, disabled, and diasporic artists are already working, healing, and organizing. To dismiss digital art is often to dismiss the epistemologies and survival strategies embedded in those practices.
The “knowledge gap” around digital art is visible in curricula that treat digital work as an elective, in canons that end before networked culture, and in collections that ignore internet‑born practices until they can be safely historicized. I feel this gap as both a wound and an invitation: a call to build pedagogies that actually meet artists where we are now, in the messy, glitchy overlaps of offline and online life.
The Digital as Trickster Technology
When I speak about the digital, I’m not simply talking about “digital institutions.” I’m interested in the digital as trickster energy—a slippery, shape‑shifting technology that can glitch dominant narratives and open up other ways of being together.
For me, the digital is powerful precisely because it refuses to stay put. A meme can live in a group chat, on a protest sign, in a gallery installation, and in someone’s dreams. An AR intervention can haunt a museum without the museum’s consent. A selfie can be both an intimate ritual and a public announcement. The digital moves across platforms and bodies, blurring boundaries between private and public, serious and frivolous, archive and ephemera.
This slipperiness is part of why institutions often treat digital practice with suspicion: it’s hard to catalog, hard to control, hard to monetize in familiar ways. But from a queer, Indigenous, and magical perspective, that very refusal of containment is what makes the digital such a vital ally. It behaves like a trickster: glitching the script, exposing contradictions, and helping us laugh at systems that were never built for our flourishing.
Who Decides What Counts as Knowledge?
One of the questions we return to in episode two is: Who decides what knowledge is official? As someone who has turned to institutional spaces to reconnect with my Wixárika ancestry, I’ve often encountered my community filtered through the gaze of white, cis male scholars. I’ve had to read about my people through a lens that treats us as objects of study rather than knowledge‑holders in our own right.
This experience is not unique to me. It’s part of a larger pattern in which institutions authorize certain forms of knowing—often those that arrive stamped with Eurocentric, ableist, heteronormative credentials—while discounting others as “folk,” “local,” or “merely personal.” The same dynamic shows up when digital, queer, or crip practices are framed as supplementary, optional, or niche.
In calling this out, I’m not asking institutions to grant us legitimacy. Instead, I’m asking us to notice how often our communities have already been doing rigorous, complex, and spiritually grounded work outside institutional frames—and to treat self‑instituted practices as real sites of theory‑making and world‑building.
Institutions as Scripts We Can Hack
In the podcast, Darleen and I talk about institutions as scripts: sets of expectations about who speaks, who listens, who assesses, and who is assessed. Desks, contracts, catalogues, mission statements, even the architecture of a museum—these are all stage elements in a performance of authority.
As an artist, I’m fascinated by works that hack those scripts: institutional drag, mock bureaucracies, speculative institutes, and unsanctioned digital interventions that overlay alternative narratives onto canonical collections. These gestures show us that institutionality itself can be mimicked, parodied, and repurposed. They remind us that “the institution” is not a natural fact but an ongoing, contested performance.
From my perspective, this is where the digital as trickster becomes especially generative. AR overlays, browser‑based exhibitions, social media campaigns, and AI‑generated “documents” can all act as glitches in institutional reality—forking the script, opening portals, and inviting audiences to experience institutions as mutable rather than monolithic.
Self‑Instituting: SISS, MOMMM, and Glitching the Museum
In the second episode, we turn toward speculative possibilities, including our own self‑instituted projects: the Selfie Institute for Selfie Studies (SISS) and the Museum of Multidimensional Mutant Maps (MOMMM).
SISS, founded by Lineadeluz, treats the selfie as a serious site of study: a vernacular ritual, an archive of embodiment, and a field of struggle over visibility, desirability, and safety. Through SISS, we imagine course catalogues on “Selfie Economies,” “Necropolitics of the Selfie,” and “Selfie Spiritualities,” and we organize online exhibitions such as “Throwing Digital Bricks: Queer Acts of Protest” and “Holographic Selves.” Here, the digital is not a neutral medium but a magical, unstable technology through which bodies can become holographic, fractal, and impossible to fully capture.
MOMMM, my own project, takes on the form of a speculative museum devoted to “multidimensional mutant maps.” It is a direct response to the violence of colonial cartography and museum display: the ways maps and vitrines have been used to extract, classify, and immobilize Indigenous lands and objects. In MOMMM, maps are alive—portals, Nierika, relational diagrams of land, spirit, and story. The digital allows these maps to be animated, interactive, and layered in ways that resist the flattening logic of conventional mapping.
Both SISS and MOMMM are, for me, ways of claiming institutional form without waiting for permission. They use institutional languages—mission statements, glossaries, exhibitions—but twist them toward futures rooted in queerness, Indigeneity, disability justice, and mutual care. They are glitches in what a museum or institute is supposed to be.
An Invitation to Watch, Listen, and Dream With Us
If any of this resonates with you—if you’ve felt institutions in your body as tension and possibility, if you’re working with digital tools in ways that feel slippery, magical, or hard to explain—I warmly invite you to engage more deeply with the series:
Watch the two episodes on YouTube to see how we move, gesture, and share images alongside our words.
Listen to the audio versions on the College Art Association site if you prefer to walk, commute, or stretch with us in your ears.
Sit with our central questions: How do institutions feel in your body? What glitches is the digital already creating in your life and practice? What might it mean for you to self‑institute, even in small ways?
These conversations are not meant to be definitive. They are offerings—portals, really—into an ongoing, collective project of reimagining pedagogy, institutional power, and the digital as a trickster ally in our work to build more livable, expansive futures.