Who We Are and How We Came Up With the Rulebreaker Method

Although we finally discovered the key to the Rulebreaker Method in a miniature city run entirely by children, the story actually begins in 2014 on the South Side of Chicago, with a fake mayoral campaign for Kanye West that unexpectedly went viral.

We’re Ben Shepard and Job Zheng, institutional performance artists and co-founders of Rulebreakers English Studios.

In 2014, Ben created the website for a hypothetical campaign for Kanye West to become Mayor of Chicago. Word of the site spread fast—from a local blog to BET, MTV, and the Chicago Tribune. Although West chose a very different political path, the impact of that simple site revealed the power of these kinds of imaginary institutions.

We met in 2016 in Shanghai, fell in love, and immediately began performing institutions. Our first collaboration was 早房 — Dawn House — an experimental residential school. Over the next few years, we continued to perform these fictional institutions: a cooperative bike company in Ho Chi Minh City, a conceptual consulting firm, and a series of ephemeral studios that blurred the line between art and enterprise.

In 2021, we enrolled together at the Institut für Kunst im Kontext at Berlin’s Universität der Künste — the Institute for Art in Context at the University of the Arts. We wanted to take our institutional performances to the next scale and hoped the German progressive art-academic system would help us do so. It didn’t, but we did become the first research fellows at Mini-München, also known as the Spielstadt.

Every two years, for three weeks each summer, about four thousand children between the ages of 7 and 15 come together to create a small city—complete with a representative government, stock market, university, television station, theater, and dozens of craft workshops: leather-making, print-making, scent-making.

No classes, but so much learning. Learning how to run a government, a stock exchange, how to make movies, perfume, paintings, newspapers. Perhaps the child playing judge in the Mini-München Court didn’t think of herself as an institutional performance artist—but we saw the connection. Extended make-believe makes people passionate to learn.

Here is three-quarters of the Rulebreakers Method: make learning English fun by using it in extended make-believe — institutional performance — the studios. The other quarter: try to make the make-believe real. Have the consultants really consult. The imagineers really imagineer.

We are now raising funds to open a year-long proof-of-concept storefront to demonstrate this model at scale. Until then, we’re running as many workshops as possible to test the idea and refine the method.