Research Service

Critical engagements with discrete subjects on assignment.

Research Service is the collaborative endeavor of Mashinka Firunts, Avi Alpert, and Danny Snelson. We create events that blend scholarly investigation, performance making, and creative writing. Our work goes against the unspoken assumption that intellectual labor has reached its formal perfection in the standard lecture, wherein the only progress occurs in contentual innovations. Our projects seek innovation in the movement between form and content, and propose that research is as much a question of aesthetic inquiry as abstract thought. To these ends, Research Service crafts unique lecture-performances for each concept with which we’re confronted.

Our practice also stresses the communal nature of knowledge production. As such, we seek to position the audiences as nodes within the event-structure, creating a heightened affective situation for the sharing of conceptual labor.

Performances, lectures, and artworks have appeared at The New Museum (NY), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Institute of Contemporary Art (PA), The Drawing Center (NY), Lisa Cooley Gallery (NY), and elsewhere.