These are the institutes
I’m building.
Founder of 618 Institutes
I make complex subjects understandable. Building independent institutes, each devoted to one subject.
Mike Oustamanolakis, PhD · Registrar
PhD, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
The register
The institutes study their subjects. This one studies their proportions.
| Institute | Subject | Interior logic |
|---|---|---|
| Corpus | The scholarly record, read as a library | the reading rooms |
| Symbolic | How meaning is compressed into marks | the atlas & its cabinets |
| Hanzi Design | Characters as cosmology — a wing of Symbolic | the museum of rooms |
| Written | The world’s scripts as artefacts | the museum floors of type |
| Canto 粵學院 | Cantonese culture first, language second | the geographic arc |
| Interfaces | Where the hand meets the machine | the building as grain-zoom |
The charter
- One subject each. Institutes hold one ground and name its borders.
- One logic each. Institutes develop an interior logic, never repeated elsewhere.
- Declared modes. Institutes distinguish observation, interpretation and speculation.
- No verdicts. Institutes publish dimensions; readers decide what matters.
The treaty office
Where two institutes could claim the same ground, there are some boundaries.
| Treaty | The border | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Symbolic ↔ Written | Symbolic studies the encoding; Written studies the artefact. | Adopted |
| Symbolic ↔ Hanzi | A wing, not a peer. Han semantics at Hanzi Design; Han typography at Written. | Standing |
| The specimen rule | An object may be examined by several institutes, but only one may take it as its subject. The others name their own question and use the object as a specimen. | Standing |