Fractal Institute for Arts & Technology

About Fractal Institute for Arts & Technology

FIAT is a sister school to Fractal University. If FractalU is like undergrad, FIAT is more like grad school. FIAT classes are more rigorous, require greater time commitment, and have more selective admissions criteria than FractalU classes. Additionally, each FIAT course requires students to produce and publish an artifact — for example, a performance, an event series, or a white paper.

FIAT was originally created in the context of The Fractalists: A Historical Reenactment. Thus, FIAT’s founders are Max Lucas and Genevieve Cantara-Blake, the characters that Tyler Alterman and Bridget MacAvoy, respectively, created and played during this live-action role-play. Tyler and Bridget run FIAT as their Fractalists characters.

Fall Intensives

FIAT intensives require much greater dedication than an ordinary class as well as a final challenge or work product.

Quantitative Trading Bootcamp

from Ricki Heicklen

4 days, 9/2-9/5
Mon-Thu, 10am-7pm
Fractal Tech Hub: 111 Conselyea St, Brooklyn

Learn the fundamentals of quantitative trading—markets, order books, auctions, risk and sizing, adverse selection, arbitrage, how quant trading firms make money. Culminates in an electronic trading competition.

Advanced Improvisational Indian Cooking

from Keesh Lauria

8 classes, 9/12-10/31
Thursdays, 6:30-8pm
28 St Marks Ave, Brooklyn

Get better at Indian cooking. Every class is like an episode of Chopped.

Foundations of NYC: Hard Mode

from Daniel Golliher

10 weeks, 9/16-10/18 (excepting 10/21)
Mondays, 6:30-8:30pm
Near Atlantic Terminal

Learn the foundations of NYC government, how to build political capital, and get things done in the city. The “hard mode” of this class will have you substantially engage with every major part of the political system – eg giving testimony to the City Council.

Writing Fiction

from Andrew Blevins

8 classes, 9/16 - 11/4
Tuesdays 6-8:30pm
578 Lafayette St, Brooklyn

A challenging course about enjoying writing while doing a lot of it.

Fractal Dev Bootcamp

from Priya & Andrew Rose and Jake Zegil

12 weeks, 9/23-12/20
Weekdays, 9am-7pm + Saturdays 10am-4pm
Fractal Tech Hub: 111 Conselyea St, Brooklyn

Welcome to the liveliest engineering school in NYC. Fractal Bootcamp is a 3-month, immersive coding bootcamp in NYC, built by founders and engineering leaders, designed to turn you into a high-velocity startup engineer.

Parallax: A Collective Intelligence Experiment

from Robert Hart

12 weeks, plus launch event, 11/4-2/22
First week in-person in Brooklyn, followed by flexible work-from-home 15-20 hours/week

A rigorous course to design & launch a research collective.

Clown Through Mask

from Sue Morrison

2 weeks, 10/11-10/22
Every evening except Sunday, 6-10pm
Location TBD: Brooklyn

Based on the pioneering work of Richard Pochinko, the workshop synthesizes Indigenous and European clowning traditions to guide you in the discovery of your uncompromisingly sincere clown.

Executive Board

Genevieve Cantara-Blake (alias Bridget MacAvoy)

Vie is a patron of the arts, poet, party host, playwright, professor, and pronunciamento-ist. In collaboration with Max Lucas, she convened the polyphonic collective of artists, technologists, and philosophers known as the Fractalists in late summer 2024.
Bridget is a writer and works in arts philanthropy. Previously, she was in publishing and taught English abroad. She enjoys crafting and throwing experimental parties and is working toward reforming arts patronage models.
Max Lucas (alias Tyler Alterman)

Max Lucas is a novelist, playwright, professor, and theater director. He co-convened the Fractalists in order to awaken the Polyphony, a chimeric planetary organism that would interweave myriad ideologies, institutions, cultures, gods, and species.
Tyler is a founder & artist who is interested in the research and advancement of the good life. Currently, he is a cofounder of Fractal University in New York. Previously he has built startups (Reserve, The Think Tank), grown social movements (Effective Altruism, Reducetarianism), run cognitive science research in and out of academia (Yale, UChicago, Metamorphic Group), and participated in a lot of weird performance art.
Andrew Roberts (alias TBA)

Andrew is founder of Fractal and Fractal University. Previously he founded Qrono, was founding engineer at Culdesac, and acted as Interim Head of School at Guidepost Montessori at Museum Mile