home is where the heart is – itinerant space

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.

home is where the heart is
Karen Bosy

Project overview —

My critical-documentarist art practice presents images of sorts, and effects that move through space. The video practice is within the traditions and parameters of experimental, documentary, and structural film, and the three landscape genres. Attention is on the language of film and video, on what is being said and how to say it. The work screened here, home is where the heart is, is one of a continuing series of video and photographic works within this title that attends to a duo of birch trees standing to the side of the marsh. One duet partner takes an errant position showing practices that are necessarily material and the framing of space as space/time put forward by cultural geography (Massey). In this sense, this video documents the path of walking and its political effects in accord with structural film’s enquiry into its own material practices and materialism in film.

References
Massey, Doreen B. (2005) For Space. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE.
Rees, Alan L. (2020) Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship. London New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Biography

When I was a child, my family moved from Toronto, a city in the middle of a continent to a rural island in the Caribbean Sea. Although I was young, this move away from extended family and a place I understood as my world, brought into view for me the constructedness of my reality. As James Lingwood explains: ‘we learn to interpret the conversations associated with photography, cinema, painting, street signs and so on,’ and our knowledge of these systems ’lead us to believe that the world is a fixed and orderly place’ (Lingwood quoted in Kester, Rachel Whiteread’s House, 1995). Lingwood’s comment corresponds to an early impression of my new home where, mixed in with my astonishment at the clichéd truth of the velvety heat of the scented tropical air, was my awareness of the unfamiliar design of street lighting.

As a result of this move, my understanding of television also changed. What had been for me a remotely controlled, public form of entertainment became a tool for communication within the community. My mother’s informational puppet show, she was in public health then, was broadcast daily. The puppets could be found in the opening time slot on the sole TV channel of this island, broadcast during after school hours. In contrast with this experience of the image as a productive space, later my school selected me and other girls to play the pirates for a commercial promoting Birds Eye ready-made food for children, which was also broadcast in the UK. This experience highlighted for me the role of landscape within the potential of moving image.

Subsequently back in Toronto, I studied painting at OCAD and then printmaking and painting at The Slade School of Fine Art. Currently I move between London and Toronto; my work has been held at the Eagle Gallery, Emma Hill Fine Art for many years. As a PhD candidate at RCA, I am considering the dispersed nature of site and conversations associated with media. My main field of reference is experimental film and I use photography, drawing and other media in my video installation practice and my practice-based research. My proposed submission date is Sept 2024. My thesis title is Inside here: dispersal as a strategy in landscape-based critical-documentarist art practice

vault, on-going series of works can be found on itinerant space, Issue 1: Pilot Issue, keyword dispersal.
@kmbosy, www.kmbosy.com/blog.

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