The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.) has developed a parabureaucratic method as the operating system of its practice of artistic self-institution. Its procedures draw on late twentieth-century administrative culture and its layers of red tape: protocols, contracts, memoranda, stamps and authorisations through which institutional authority was made visible.
For O.J.A.I., bureaucracy turns intention into consequence. Red tape authorises actions, protocols create relationships, and invented procedures confer legitimacy on private fascinations. Gary Farrelly and Chris Dreier use these processes to explore shared authorship, self-accreditation and authority, while giving institutional form to architectural erotics and shared obsessions.
The presentation follows O.J.A.I.’s own Red Line, an imagined transport link connecting disparate ideas, institutions and fixations while crossing the red lines between artistic and administrative practice, private fixation and public authority, invented procedure and operative fact. As administration becomes increasingly automated and immaterial, O.J.A.I. will deploy performative capacities through sound, braided monologue, public information and collective compliance.
Bio:
The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence (O.J.A.I.) was founded in 2015 by Gary Farrelly and Chris Dreier and operates between Brussels and Berlin. Conceived as a speculative para-intelligence agency, it produces research, material forms and public situations through an ongoing practice of self-institution. O.J.A.I. holds a permanent radio residency with Berlin-based Cashmere Radio. Its work has been presented at Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin; Marres, Maastricht; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Ormston House, Limerick; and The Seduction of the Bureaucrat, a 2023 exhibition and public programme on art and bureaucracy at De Garage, Mechelen. In 2025, Set Margins published Self-Institution / Terminology Audit, the outcome of O.J.A.I.’s multi-year research into self-instituted artistic entities.
