Autoimmune Animations: Intimacies of Care and Constraint

itinerant space: a journal of art, design and communication research practices, is an experimental online platform for doctoral researchers at RCA.

Editor-in-chief: Professor Teal Triggs
Founding editors: Nick Bell, Karen Bosy, Kirsty Smith
Editors, Issue 2: Nick Bell, Karen Bosy, Kam Rehal

Contact: itinerant.space@rca.ac.uk
itinerant space, School of Communication, Royal College of Art, Garden House, Dorando Close, London W12 7FN

Peer review panel:
Karen Bosy, Gabrielle Mowat (School of Arts and Humanities)
Nick Bell, Carmen Hannibal, Kam Rehal (School of Communication)
Orla Fahey (School of Design)

Website design: Regular Practice.
Site development: Mads Kullberg

Call for submissions

Guide to submitting

Peer review panel

Application form: peer review panel member

Notes from the Founding Editors, itinerant space issue 1: pilot (2021)
Karen Bosy, Nick Bell, Kirsty Smith and Editor-in-Chief, Teal Triggs

Communication research is emerging internationally as a robust interdisciplinary practice. We find ourselves up against a sense of urgency to address rapidly shifting socio-political-cultural-technological environments. Postgraduate, post-doctoral and early career researchers are playing a substantive role in leading research into, for, and through critical communication theories, methods, and practices. New knowledge emerges out of radical and often disruptive approaches, but can only be successful if underpinned by a sympathetic understanding of those we are working with. At the same time, we are seeing an increase in the importance of the ways communication research is informing, shaping, and challenging the precarity of change; and, with this, a questioning of the way in which communication research and practices are ‘made public’ and disseminated as conversation.

KS: Questioning the role of communication, democracy and diversity within academic publishing, our aim is to examine what these standards of communication symbolise, and query systems of publishing.

itinerant space sets out to explore, interrogate and critically reflect on communication research practices, and we begin with the contributions of School of Communication postgraduate researchers. The gestation period of the journal has been lengthy. We began the process in a world reeling from the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020, and continued with the key conversations taking place during a period of lockdown and reliance on online platform technologies. The ongoing debate between the editorial team and the broader cohort of postgraduate researchers and external guests focussed on radically rethinking what communication publishing might mean. If we have learned anything, it is that a slow, generative process steeped in dialogue, and reflection, can lead to new ways of thinking and making.

KB: For me the keyword grammar of itinerant space can function as a diagram, an assemblage, supporting an ongoing process of interaction and iterative conversation.

NB: Ongoing dialogue can meander; it can be unruly and perhaps should not be packaged in the same way.

itinerant space is an ongoing project. Its very nature is developmental, continually transformed through an engagement with its readers. We invite you to join us as we move forward on our research journey.

Contributor Biographies

Archive

Issue 2 is a milestone for the journal.
Prior to the launch of itinerant space issue 1: pilot (2021), research conversations took place within the School of Communication’s supportive environments. As editors we used the opportunity to bounce research ideas between each other, engage in critical debate, and reflect on findings with our PGR cohort and supervisors. The pilot stage was useful. Our agreed approach served a purpose: to establish academic publishing confidence, to road test itinerant space as an online platform, and fine-tune journal processes.

Issue 2 is a catalyst for knowledge sharing.
It was always in the journal’s five-year plan that issue 2 would build on the learning of the pilot issue to iteratively develop an expanded network of the RCA’s wider doctoral research community, and to stretch beyond the academy. We felt the urgency of our own research, but also the desire to connect with other PGRs in learning more about individual research practices. As an experimental platform, the journal offered a unique opportunity to inform interdisciplinary conversations and modes of research dissemination.

Issue 2 is a process.
The editorial team methodically explored academic peer-review models in the development of processes that would align with the journal’s values and aspirations. We expanded our learning network to include doctoral researchers from the RCA’s Schools and Research Centres, by inviting them to participate as contributors and peer-to-peer reviewers. The intent was to establish a publishing process based on a critical, yet supportive, dialogue between editors, reviewers, and contributors. We also explored a new vocabulary to describe alternative ways of talking about published research. For example, moving from ‘fragments’ to ‘extracts’, and from ‘articles’ to ‘research-in-progress’. This mirrors the intellectual development of PGRs and their individual research journeys. We invited RCA’s PGRs to join in debate, foreground their research experiences, and help shape and inform doctoral-level research conversations.

Issue 2 is an iteration.
To give a taste of this process, each editor has responded to the keyword ‘iteration’:

‘Iterative process affords differences and the act of differing, in the sense of Derrida’s notion of différance. My research argues that artists use dispersal as a strategy to open the potential for political debate, an iterative process. Dispersive strategies put pressure on the frame(s) or ‘structures’ in moving image works. The potential for political debate comes out of the freeing up of thought.’ – Karen Bosy

‘In longitudinal, constructionist participatory practice, multiple versions of methods iterated by community leaders, each operating in different yet overlapping social contexts, expand the possibilities through which participation in social infrastructure can be entered into and experienced.’ – Nick Bell

‘Iterating is an active process of moving toward or closer to a sense of understanding. The practice (or doing) of research invites us to generate the conditions within which iteration might emerge.’ – Kam Rehal

‘Each stage of our research leads to seeing something fresh – an iteration is borne out of curiosity, the experiential, and making sense of the world at that moment.’ – Teal Triggs

Issue 2 is a call to action and a contribution to new knowledge.

The Editorial Team would like to thank the fifteen contributors whose work features in issue 2 and those who worked tirelessly behind the scenes as the journal’s six peer-to-peer reviewers.

Autoimmune Animations: Intimacies of Care and Constraint
Hannah Clarkson

Project overview —

These animations are experiments through which to explore the relationality between different areas and methods of my research and practice: drawing, performance, and the medical humanities. They are a method of engaging with method; a way of trying to understand what relationship drawing might have to movement or performance through a choreography of control and letting go. Made by feeding my drawings into an app created to animate children’s drawings of people, it would be easy to assume that these animations might provide a direct translation into or a score for performance. Instead, what emerge are absurd ‘autoimmune’ animations of a body which seems forced into movements it doesn’t want to make. Or, perhaps this is precisely the plurality my research as a whole seeks, acknowledging the intimate relationalities between care and constraint; the ambivalence of an autoimmune body which both protects and provokes itself. In trying animation for the first time through an app wherein I cannot control what my drawings might become, this research extract hopes to embrace that paradox of a body (the physical body/a body of research) struggling to exert control over itself; whilst giving itself over to movement towards a place or sensation unknown.

This exposition is an extract from my ongoing practice-led PhD research, The Art of A(r)mour: playful strategies of resistance, costumes of care and absurd decorum for the autoimmune body.

Biography

Hannah Clarkson is a visual artist, writer and researcher with an interest in materialities of storytelling and voice, and embodied languages of empathy. With a BFA from Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (2013) and an MFA from Konstfack, Stockholm (2017), she is currently a practice-led PhD candidate in Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London (2021-2025). Alongside an active art and writing practice, she teaches creative writing for post-graduate students at Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Publications include: Decolonizing Architecture anthology (ed., 2021); Synonyms for Shelter poetry collection (2020); and The Green Room: Perspectives on Artistic Research (ed., 2018).

In Clarkson’s PhD research – building on medical humanities practices – autoimmunity meets autopathography and absurdity in an embodied illness narrative, advocating both personal and social agency through exploration of the possibilities and parameters of play. Led by practice, this research aims to re-present ‘autoimmune’ understandings of shelter, playing with absurd sculptural costumes and performance to articulate material, relatable narratives of trauma and care.

www.hannahclarkson.co.uk

www.lahp.ac.uk/student/hannah-clarkson

Conversation: where critical friends of itinerant space are invited to comment on journal submissions as part of an ongoing research dialogue.