The Avalon Institute
Avalon is dedicated to creating the intimacy necessary for the collective pursuit of truth.
Avalon continuously experiments with formats that cultivate and communicate passion, building the network and infrastructure needed to found a new home for the revival of art and thought.
As institutional decay and atomization degrade the infrastructure meant to enable the next generation of thought and art, new contexts must be created where they can find the fellowships they need to build a future. Avalon's purpose is to provide them.
Avalon House is our initial foundation: a home in Twin Peaks for the open-ended pursuit of truth and the production of events and cultural life. Since September 2024, it has hosted poetry readings, string quartets, acted Platonic dialogues, lectures, weekend seminars, symposia, and brought together scholars from around the world.
Avalon Institute builds the capacity needed to draw enduring work into the world. Through technical and media support, publications, and the cultivation of a network, Avalon turns fellowship into a foundation. We work to maintain an ecology of collaboration and exchange where many projects can carve out a home.
We co-host with organisations that share a deep intellectual or cultural focus. Reach out →
Arts
The Guthries · Plato for the People · Dot-Com Dionysus · Schubertiade · Caroling, Shanties, Singing · NYE Poetry Competition
Lectures
Children of Monsters & Elves — Razib Khan · NP and Complexity — Charles Rosenbauer
· The Law of Terminal Distortion — Louis Sagnières · Conditions for Intellectual Culture — Geoff Anders
Seminars & Reading Groups
La Rochefoucauld · Early Psychoanalysis · Antony and Cleopatra · Konrad Lorenz · Nietzsche and Zhuangzhi ·
Neural Annealing · Post-War Film
Symposia
Hildegard Von Bingen · Nietzsche · Napoleon · Shakespeare
Avalon Conferences
We're building an apparatus to scale what we do across fields. The leading events in many disciplines have grown listless; we will run the conferences that ought to be happening, working with scholars and patrons across institutional lines. Each event brings out network closer to something capable of changing intellectual culture.
Avalon Press
Conversations on Continuity
Avalon Montreal
Avalon is seeking the funding required to make a decisive shift in San Francisco culture. Your support will create the fellowships, staff, classes, and institutional context which will help a new ecology come into existence.