Operations

We take seriously Marshall McLuhan’s insight that everything is media. Environments communicate. Systems teach. The ways we organize food, land, labour, technology, and attention all shape what can be known and how people learn. Our operations are therefore designed as living research environments—places where practice, observation, and media production collapse into one another.

The Academy of the Impossible is the name we give to our farm-based work in agroecology. It is not a retreat from media, but an expansion of it. Soil health, animal care, energy systems, and food production are treated as forms of literacy—ways of learning how power, dependency, resilience, and care actually function. This work grows out of earlier literacy initiatives in Toronto, where Metaviews focused on helping people make critical media. The farm extends that project into the material world, where feedback is immediate and abstraction is grounded in the day to day.

Alongside agroecology, Metaviews operates as an intelligence practice. Our research, analysis, and archival work sit beside our podcasts, essays, and public conversations as part of the same operational loop. Media production is not separate from research, and research is not separate from how we live. Intelligence is generated through sustained engagement with environments—political, technological, ecological—and then shared as a commons through durable publishing and dialogue.

In this sense, operations are where Metaviews thinks out loud. The farm, the studio, and the intelligence network are one system. Each informs the other. All are media.