This is a tale of two places, two higher education institutions, both distributed, although in radically different ways. The first, a regional university consisting of numerous partner colleges, an institution differenced by geography making it a university that is at times tricky to locate, which functions in a between space facilitated by technology: a generative matrix which I have dubbed a transversity. The second, an art school, named after its city, vibrant and diverse but with a strong singular and carefully managed external identity, an art school which has migrated into China, Singapore and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Overlaid with this is the tale of a person caught between two very different institutional practices, caught between what has been said and what is now done. Irit Rogoff’s words to describe the ACADEMY project, a project in which the spaces of learning and exhibiting are ‘refracted through one another’, resonated with me. For Rogoff academy does not mean institution but a series of ‘processes and speculations’ which are resistant to outcome driven education and its attendant marketisation. Thinking through academy as process and speculation enabled me to consider the institution as action and interaction, the dispersed university as a way of doing, studio as a series of interlocutions and interventions rather than simply a place to study and to make. In the period between then and now something happened to me, the leaky university traversing the Highlands and Islands became a place of the past and the art school in the city of Glasgow became a place of the future. I forced myself to ask the question – just how leaky is the art school in the city – how is leaky or porous characterised in this place? What can leaky mean here? How should I think of the geographical migrations of the art school?

• Organisation