Royal College Of Art Research Articles

Dwoskin and Me: Halting the Flow of Time

ABSTRACT: In this article, I discuss the three experimental autobiographical films that Stephen Dwoskin made between 1994 and 2003: Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994), Some Friends (Apart) (2002), and Francis in Memorium (2003). I first met Dwoskin at the Royal College of Art (RCA) film school in London, England, where I was a student in the 1970s and he was a part-time tutor. We were both Jewish with very different personal histories and experiences, but after I left the RCA, he became a close personal friend. As a disabled American expatriate, he spent most of his adult life looking at the world through a camera lens, filming his friends and lovers, and building an archive of footage that form part of these films supplemented by the extensive home movie footage filmed by his father Henry Dwoskin, a carpenter. My analysis of his films is therefore colored by my own personal recollections of him.

The Abstracted Real: Speculations on Experimental Animated Documentary

Max Hattler is an artist, researcher, curator and educator who works with abstract and experimental animation, video installa­tion, and audio-visual performance. After studying in London at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, he completed a doc­torate in fine art at the University of East London. He is an assistant professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Hattler’s work has been shown worldwide, receiving prizes from Annecy Animation Festival, Prix Ars Electronica, Montreal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Punto y Raya Festival, Cannes Lions and London International Animation Festival, among others. He has published on expanded stereoscopic approaches in experimental filmmaking and the narrative potential of abstraction in animation. He has spoken widely at international conferences such as CONFIA, the Society for Animation Studies Conference, Animafest Scanner, Ars Electronica’s Expanded Animation Symposium and the Annual China Animation Studies Conference in Chengdu. Max Hattler is the co-founder and chairman of Relentless Melt, a Hong Kong-based society for the promotion, production and dissemination of abstract and experimental animation, which presents screenings in Hong Kong and internationally. He serves on the board of directors of the iotaCenter and the editorial boards of Animation: An Interdisciplin­ary Journal, and Animation Practice, Process & Production.

Pharmacopoeia: Illness narratives.

Pharmacopoeia: Illness narratives.

Cultivations of cross-cultural experiences via a collaborative and cooperative approach for sustainable learning from communities in Si Satchanalai, Thailand

In 2018, a group of faculty members and students from King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Ladkrabang (KMITL), and Royal College of Art (RCA) organized workshops and field trips to Sukhothai pro...

Simultaneously Space and Event: Bernard Tschumi’s Conception of Architecture

This essay examines the way in which Bernard Tschumi understood and discussed the concept of space during the 1970s, interpreting it in conjunction with his relationship with the so-called ‘London Conceptualists’ whose concern was to embrace spatial experience. Tschumi’s exchanges with the conceptual and performance art scene in London are pivotal for understanding his conception of space at the time. Special attention is hence paid to a number of exhibitions that epitomized the cross-fertilisation between architecture and art, such as ‘A Space: A Thousand Words’ held at the Royal College of Art in 1975 and co-curated by Bernard Tschumi and RoseLee Goldberg. The importance of this exhibition for comprehending the role of space in Tschumi’s thought lies in the fact that it aimed ‘[t]o reveal a change in attitudes towards the theories and the language of space’, and thus to reinforce the contact of architecture with the very reality of spatial experience. The essay examines the evolution of Tschumi’s concerns about spatial praxis, addressing core issues of his 1970s pedagogical and design practice. Particular emphasis is placed upon his teaching strategies at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, and on an ensemble of projects on which he worked during his first forays in the United States of America such as <em>The Manhattan Transcripts, The Screenplays</em> and <em>The 20^th Century Follies</em>. The main objective of this essay us to render explicit how Tschumi’s conception of urban experience as simultaneously space and event is closely related to his intention to challenge the cause-effect relationships dominating Modernist views of the city. Of great significance for his understanding of urban conditions is Tschumi’s claim that in architecture the materialisation of concepts coincides with their simultaneous visual and social expression.

Changing Lessons: The Kumasi School of “Art and Crafts” in a Scottish Regime (1952-1962)

This paper fills a gap in the historiography of Ghana’s modern art curricula. Between 1952 and the turn of the 20th century, the Kumasi College of Art (KNUST), operated two successive curriculum models, the “Art as Teacher Training” model and the “Art as Industrial, Commercial and Professional Enterprise model”. “The Art as Teacher Training” model, the emphasis of this paper, was administered by a team of British and African staff of “Art and Crafts” persuasion. The first decade (1952-1962), led by a Scottish regime of Glasgow Style extraction, upgraded an extant Specialist Art and Crafts Course to a Diploma in Fine Art programme. The study shows how the changing lessons of the Gold Coast and Ghana “School of Art and Crafts” curriculum in Kumasi intersected with the changing fortunes of metropolitan British art institutions such as the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), the Slade, and Royal College of Art (RCA). The paper argues that the persistence of the “Art and Crafts” and “teacher training” ethos in the Scottish regime could have heralded a move towards an emancipated curriculum indifferent to media specialization and antithetical to media-genre-skill elitism. The author notes that the blurred boundaries between “art” and “craft” or “art” and “the everyday” seem prescient for its time, yet, the curriculum’s vocationalist and instrumentalist framework stood in the way of producing independent artists of note.

Maps of Englishness

Maps of Englishness

CraftTech: hybrid frameworks for textile-based practice

Growth in wearable technology is forecasted to grow from $30bn to $160bn over the next 10 years, suggesting consumers’ need and demand for smart wearables will be high. Smart apparel is not new, over the past decades, various technologies had been applied onto apparel, however most have received limited acceptance. In many existing products, the technology is applied as an add-on function onto garments creating obtrusive designs which are challenging to maintain in everyday lives. As noted by Dunne, existing products tend to be a culmination of apparel and technology practices instead of an integration of both. In contrast to fast evolving technologies, the fundamentals of creating and constructing a garment have remained the same since the invention of the sewing machine in the 1800s. Using the data collected from a collaborative workshop between the Institute of Textiles & Clothing (ITC), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPolyU) and The Royal College of Art (RCA), this paper reports on the development of a hybrid design framework utilising interdisciplinary approaches to smart materials, methods and techniques to bridge the gap between design technologies. With a common focus on praxis, the teams tested, challenged and extended the affordances of polymeric optical fibre through experimental iteration, failure and reiteration.

Understanding how attitudes towards autonomous vehicles can shape the design of cities

Understanding public attitudes towards autonomous vehicles is an important starting point when designing and engineering future cities, both to ensure acceptance and to deliver social benefits. The GATEway project is a consortium of industry and academic organisations that are establishing a test bed for driverless vehicle technology within public streets in Greenwich, London. Each partner is using public trials to explore the potential for autonomous technology within a city transport network. The Royal College of Art (RCA) is exploring how public attitudes can be used to enhance social benefit. This paper shares the first findings from a series of workshops including people with additional needs, non-drivers, drivers, technology enthusiasts and professional stakeholders. The workshops delved into people's hopes and fears for driverless technologies and used co-design methods to explore how designers can respond when designing autonomous vehicles, the services they provide and the wider urban environment.

Animation as mindful practice

Abstract This article reports on a joint research project at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and the Royal College of Art that investigates whether the making of drawn animation can be demonstrated as a mindful practice. The original intention of the project was to explore the potential application of Buddhist principles and practices such as mindfulness within a practical, secular context to benefit art and design students who experience stress in the learning environment and who wish to examine their learning processes more closely. This research project is situated within wider developments in UK higher education that seek to enable students to engage meaningfully with the affective and extra-rational dimensions of learning. Faced with a complex and uncertain future, and curricula that encourage engagement in uncertainty and ambiguity, art and design graduates need to be able to take responsibility for their personal development and respond to stress and change in generative and constructive ways. During the research process, a series of experiential activities and workshops were devised to explore the development of a group of capacities identified in a number of published sustainability literacy frameworks, in particular the attributes of personal resilience, self-awareness and interconnectedness through systemic and relational thinking and making. The project looks at the potential of the processes of drawn animation in combination with short-form mindfulness meditation techniques for developing these and associated attributes.

Talking the line: Inclusive strategies for the teaching of drawing

Abstract This paper reports on a series of drawing workshops held at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, which tested an original pedagogical strategy designed to help dyslexic and/or dyspraxic art and design students who had reported difficulties with their abilities to make accurate representational drawings. A group of non-dyslexic/dyspraxic RCA students volunteered as control group, and both cohorts completed three days of workshops in the Drawing Studio of the RCA. Results of recorded interviews eliciting student observations as they drew, and a questionnaire in the form of a Likert scale, administered before and after the workshop, indicate positive shifts in both cohorts’ attitudes towards specific aspects of the stages involved in the production of accurate representational drawings of still-life set-ups, the human skeleton and the clothed life-model. Assessment of the drawings produced indicates positive shifts in the two cohorts in geometric accuracy and other qualitative criteria embedded in the teaching strategy such as control of scale, proportion and illusions of depth. Both cohorts displayed similar positive attitude shifts and both sets of drawings indicated similar positive shifts in visual qualities. An interim conclusion posits that the pedagogical strategy appears to enhance the abilities of both dyslexic/dyspraxic students and non-dyslexic/dyspraxic students to make accurate representational drawings. This result correlates closely with the findings of an earlier, prototype workshop held at the RCA in July 2012. It is suggested that similar pedagogically inclusive strategies might produce positive results in the context of secondary schools as part of a more inclusive curriculum.

A journey – crossing boundaries

ABSTRACTDr George L. Mallen writes about his introduction to computer simulation in the early 1960s and his work with Gordon Pask, founder and director of System Research Ltd, a convergence point of cognitive science, computer technology and art. In 1969 Mallen co-founded the Computer Arts Society and helped to organize Event One at the Royal College of Art which brought computers into the art school. In 1969 he formed System Simulation Ltd and in 1970 developed ECOGAME, a system dynamics model of a hypothetical national economy, implemented at the First European Management Forum, the predecessor of the World Management Forum. Some of the ECOGAME technology was also used by Stafford Beer for the government economic decision room he designed and implemented for the Allende government in Chile in 1972–1973.

Performances, Acknowledgments, and Dinner: Closing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration

Performances, Acknowledgments, and DinnerClosing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), Charles Henry Rowell, Rizvana Bradley (bio), Nathaniel Mackey (bio), Joshua Bennett (bio), Howard Dodson (bio), and Ben Okri (bio) The closing of the 40th Anniversary Celebration included the presentation of the Lifetime Achievement Awards, closing remarks by Howard Dodson and Ben Okri, and musical performances by Carole Strong Thompson, Robert Reid, Hermine Pinson, and Harris Simon. WOUBSHET: I conducted an interview with Dr. Rowell at the Goethe-Institut in Addis Abba back in 2009, a year before the Callaloo Conference in Addis in 2010. I asked him, foolishly, “Dr. Rowell, how do you keep up with the literary trends of the day so that the journal keeps current?” Without skipping a beat, he replied, “We don’t have to keep up since we set the trend.” [Laughter] Foolish question, wise answer. Callaloo has been setting the standard for the past forty years, and in the process has forever changed the American and English literary canon. It has done so by prizing rigor, experimentation, what Greg Pardlo calls “radical individuality,” and also our collective ideals of justice, of freedom, and of beauty. Dr. Rowell, we treasure you, we love you, and we thank you for being our standard-bearer. Please, I was going to say “raise your glass” but raise your hand to Charles Rowell. I’d like to invite to the podium the Editor of Callaloo, Dr. Charles Henry Rowell. [Applause] ROWELL: We also honor the people who have been setting trends in various forms of art in literature, in literary criticism, in fiction writing, and in visual art. That’s what we’re going to do tonight. First, we will honor Frank Bowling for his lifetime achievement in visual art. Rizvana will not only speak about him, but she will accept his award. He is not able to be with us this evening. BRADLEY: Thank you so much, Dr. Rowell. It is a great honor to speak about Frank Bowling’s work, as I’ve also had the honor of teaching his work in many of my courses in art history and visual studies. Frank Bowling’s paintings have been exhibited widely and internationally. His selected solo shows have included the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and a touring retrospective in the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It’s worth noting as well that in 2017 the Haus der Kunst in Munich will present Frank Bowling: Mappa Mundi, a comprehensive survey of large-scale paintings. Frank Bowling, Order of the British Empire, was born in 1936 in Guiana and moved to London in 1953, where his artistic career began shortly after his arrival at the Royal College of Art. He started his career as a figurative painter and then moved to abstraction and became involved in the British pop movement in the 1950s and [End Page 197] 1960s. His first solo exhibition, Image in Revolt, was hosted the year Bowling graduated at the Grabowski Gallery in London, and he decided to move to New York in 1966, as Stuart Hall noted in a very well-known essay about Black British artists published in the 1980s. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967. Bowling’s paintings began to turn to abstraction, the field in which his contributions were to be most significant, and he was frequently visited by the art critic, Clement Greenberg. His series of quasi-abstract color fields, overlaid with stenciled images of maps of Australia, South America, and Africa, are his best known works, in which he experimented with the possibilities of paint. It has been noted that Bowling’s legacy concerns his innovations with new process within his paintings. It should also be noted that he developed a special mechanical apparatus, which tilted the canvas so he could pour paint on it, and that allowed him to create what we now know as his famous and iconic poured paintings. I’m very happy today to be able to speak about his work very briefly and his contribution to contemporary art, and I’m honored to accept this award on his...

An Investigation into ‘Autoethnography’ in Fashion and Textile Practice-led Research

Practice-led research develops tacit knowledge through practice. This personal knowledge needs to be shared, to be accepted in academia. Autoethnography, which is an ethnographic method relating subjectivity to social science, is sometimes used to connect tacit knowledge with academic one in practice-led research. Through fashion and textile practice-led PhD case studies from renowned UK institutions such as the Royal College of Art and University of the Arts London, the characteristics of autoethnography in fashion and textile practice-led research are identified. Firstly, autoethnography in practice-led research adopts various areas of the social sciences as practice-led research does. Secondly, autoethnography makes readers feel intimate with the author and helps readers to understand practice-led research and tacit knowledge. Thirdly, it is used as a way of knowing, and sometimes leading research. Fourthly, it sometimes leads to unexpected results. Fifthly, a researcher can review the process to find something wrong, missing or unnecessary. Thus, autoethnography is an effective and reliable method not only to make a subjective practice objective but also to develop practice and fashion and textile practice-led research through investigating its process. This study contributes to producing tacit knowledge by using autoethnography in practice-led research and helps understand the nature of practice-led research in order for it to be expanded into art and design area.

Fashioning the sixties: fashion narratives of older women

ABSTRACTThe popular media suggest that we are witnessing ‘a fashion for older women’ and that ‘the latest new faces to light up campaigns and covers’ are retirees (The Guardian, 16 September 2012). Do fashion designers know this? On the one hand, Sir Christopher Frayling, former Rector of the Royal College of Art in the United Kingdom, observes that we need a change in mind-set for the art school of the future since design students’ attitudes to designing for older people is that it is really boring (‘Start the Week’, BBC Radio 4, 19 November 2012). On the other hand, the sculptor Antony Gormley states that ‘Art schools are the things that reinforce agency in the world’. This paper emerges out of an ongoing conversation between a group of women friends about how they feel about clothes and the fashion choices on offer to them. The women constitute a sub-group of women in their sixties who grew up in the 1960s, against a background of ‘cultural revolution’ in British fashion that emerged out of the art schools.

Collision, Collusion and Coincidence: Pop Art’s Fairground Parallel

This article looks at parallel methods, motivations and modes of consumption between formative British pop art and British fairground art. I focus on two strands, the emergent critical work of the Independent Group and the school of artists based at the Royal College of Art under the nominal leadership of Peter Blake. I use iconographical and iconological methods to compare the content of the art, and then examine how pop art tried to create both a critical and playful distancing from established rules and practices of the artistic canon. I focus on non-institutional cultural groupings and diffuse production and consumption models.

The lonely crowd: Dwoskin, Durgnat and the London Film-Makers’ Co-op

Stephen Dwoskin and Raymond Durgnat first met in 1966. Both taught in art schools, Dwoskin at the London College of Printing, Durgnat at St Martin’s, and both were early members of the London Film-Makers’ Co-op (LFMC), founded that autumn. Durgnat first saw Dwoskin’s films during the Co-op’s inaugural ‘Spontaneous Festival of Underground Movies’, which was staged at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre – attached to another art school, the Central – and promoted by Durgnat in the newly launched underground paper IT . The following summer Durgnat published the first substantial article on Dwoskin, ‘Dwoskin’s dream-films’, in the second issue of the LFMC’s journal Cinim , which Dwoskin designed. The moment is freighted with countercultural mystique. But the encounter of Dwoskin and Durgnat took place in the margins of, or in unfamiliar incarnations of, these much attended-to sites and institutions, and their friendship developed apart from them. While Dwoskin’s relationship with the LFMC and with the funding bodies which began to support artists’ films in the 1970s was never easy, he had the support of some of the writers grouped around Screen , including Laura Mulvey and Paul Willemen. Durgnat, however, was persona non grata: ‘They’re very possessive about me now, though, Ray’, Dwoskin told him in an interview published in 1984, when they were both teaching at the Royal College of Art. ‘They don’t want heretics like you writing about me.’ 1 Nonetheless, Durgnat’s perspective on his work was one that Dwoskin to some extent endorsed, and the two of them collaborated on a film project whose theme may have been inspired by the LFMC’s chaotic early years. Though Durgnat had more in common with his critics than might be supposed, his was indeed a dissenting perspective, rendered in the same confessional spirit in which Dwoskin made his films, and there is no attempt in what follows to mitigate what is properly troubling.

Translating the quantum world to human scale: an art-science collaboration.

In the spring of 2014, master's degree students in the Information Experience Design (IED) program at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and physics PhD students at Imperial College London (ICL) entered into a one-month collaboration with the purpose of translating the concepts and methods of quantum physics to a human scale. Engaging in both high- and low-tech approaches, the students used (for example) balloons, lasers, speakers, lenticular printing, and physical computing to create spatial and experiential installations. The final result of the PhysicSpace project was an exhibition entitled Physics Happens in a Dark Place, held in the basement of London's historic Shoreditch Town Hall. This article describes three of the seven installations from that exhibition.

‘WAKE/UP/AND/DREAM/FOR/THE/EIGHTIES’: Nigel Coates 1975–82

Nigel Coates graduated from Bernard Tschumi's unit at the Architectural Association in 1974, before joining him in 1977 to develop a new unit together. These were formative years for Coates, a period that shaped his architectural preoccupations for the following decades – yet they remain relatively unexplored. Between 1974 and 1977, Coates produced a number of installation and performance works with the artist Antonio Lagarto and fellow AA graduate Jenny Lowe, influenced by Tschumi's own explorations with the curator RoseLee Goldberg, and their exhibition at the Royal College of Art, A Space: A Thousand Words (1975). The works considered the potential for space to be amplified by the introduction of markers, representations of other spaces and the movement of the body. This article exposes these works for the first time, tracing the changes in Coates's thinking during this period and how it was reflected in the Unit 10 briefs that he and Tschumi developed in the period 1977–80. It chronicles Coates's pivotal trips to New York during 1980–81 to teach at Bennington College, where his exposure to a dynamic club-scene and influential new art would mark a step change in the young architect's trajectory. Charting Coates's development through his own work and his teaching at the AA, the article constructs the background from which the radical architectural group NATØ emerged in 1983.

Review: Sir Hugh Casson PRA, Making Friends

Sir Hugh Casson PRA, Making Friends Royal Academy of Arts, London 31 May–22 September 2013 Sir Hugh Casson PRA, Making Friends was a small exhibition that commemorated a man whose career spanned fifty years and included a period as president of the Royal Academy (1976–84). Curated by the architectural historian Neil Bingham, and designed by Casson’s daughter’s Dinah, the tone of the exhibition was set with the description of him as “a spirited leader and a uniting force in the arts, delighting the public and profession alike.” The approach taken to the curation was chronological and biographical. The exhibition opened with an outline of Casson’s early life and architectural training (Cambridge, then the Bartlett School in London). Next, two of the first room’s walls were devoted, one to his war work, when he served as a camouflage officer, and one to “Exhibitions and Interiors,” describing his role as director of architecture at the Festival of Britain and commissions for interiors such as on the Royal Yacht Britannia . A central block of vitrines displayed family correspondence, sketchbooks, and examples of his design work. The second room was devoted to “Architecture” and began with Casson’s prewar work as assistant to the modernist designer Christopher Nicholson on schemes for Augustus John and the patron of the surrealists, Edward James. The main focus was on the longest period of his professional life in partnership with …