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

Copyright © 2021-2024, Royal College of Art

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

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.

Hysterical Chorus, Vienna
Sharon Young

Project overview —

Hysterical Chorus, Vienna

This suite of short films, made around the streets of Vienna, enact the imagined footsteps of hysterical patients that visited Sigmund Freud during his time practicing psychoanalysis at Berggasse 19. The sound piece is produced using texts from Sharon Young’s book Ms. B; The Hysterical Episodes in which excerpts from Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (1896) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), which focus on the protagonists’ symptoms of hysteria, are vocalised by the artist and layered as a chorus. Echoing around Vienna this work conjures a choral haunting of all the hysterics that visited this place. Alongside the ambient noise, which situates this historical research in the present day, these fragmented films facilitate a connection with voices of today with those of ‘yesteryear’ and seek an acknowledgment of the hysterical voice that was, and is still, so often dismissed.

This art work evolved from Sharon Young’s PhD research Once More with feeling; A Reinvention of Hysteria using photography, performance and autofiction.

With thanks to Joseph Costi for the collaborative sound production and Karen Bosy for help with filming.

Biography

Dr Sharon Young is an artist working on feminist strategies of subversion through multi-disciplinary approaches to language based artistic research. She is a lecturer in photography, fine art and performance at Glasgow School of Art, University of the Arts, London, Ithaca College, London Centre, Boston University, Study Abroad, London and Royal College of Art, London.

Her work has been presented and exhibited worldwide including The Freud Museum, London, Stroud Film Festival, Tate Exchange; Liverpool // Venice, Encontros das Imagem, Braga; Goa Photo Festival; Cosmos, Arles; The Centre of Photography, Clement-Ferrond, Tate Liverpool, and P3 Ambika Gallery, London and has been the recipient of awards such as Flash Forward Magenta Awards, Canada and The International Photography Awards, New York. Her work is held in public collections such as the V&A Library, The Yale Centre for British Art and PhotoIreland Foundation. She has presented her research at conferences such as She is Hysterical, UCLA, PSi 25, Calgary, Ithaca College, New York and University of Oxford.

Sharon has a PhD from the Royal College of Art entitled:
Once More with Feeling: A reinvention of ‘hysteria’; through photography, performance and autofiction.

You can see more of her work at: @sharonyoung_studio, www.sharonyoungstudio.com

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

itinerant space

Issue 2: iterations

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Hysterical Chorus, Vienna
Sharon Young

Suffocate

Could not

See things clearly

A squint

Double vision

Severe visual disturbance

Seraphic harps

Azure skies

I complained of a deep darkness

inside my head

Tears trickled

Tears of a heart wounded by life

Flaming wings

Carrying me away

Carrying me away in their arms

Enveloped with warm air

Rid me of all suffering

He felt it between his fingers

He did not hurry

Rekindling my sadness

I complained of a deep darkness inside my head

I strained with imbecile persistence

To fix my attention

My lungs heaved as if they would burst

Of becoming deaf and blind

And of having two selves

Softly spoken words

Echoed and re-echoed

Gentle speeches

rage

Tears tricked onto the pillow

I pulled buttons off the linen and bedclothes

I could not see things clearly

Trembled

I strained

I hallucinated

Disorganised speech

Not finding words and then losing all grammatical structure

Piecing together four or five languages

Of becoming two selves

I strained

I hallucinated

Separate states of consciousness

Tears trickled

I hallucinated

But with an effort I conquered the spasm

She conquered the spasm

See things clearly

Fall to the ground unconscious

Into a period of somnambulism

I hallucinate

Pleasure

Not being able to think

Followed by a stupor lasting for days

Gentle speeches

Tremble with rage

Unintelligible

Mute

Tears trickled

Pleasure

Ecstatic transports

Incursions of grace

Faster larger

Into your hands

Suspected love

Pulsating there

Near

A powerful force

Flesh relieved

My whole being dissolved in love

My head fell back

Pleasure

Ecstatic transports

Clouds

Rays dazzling halos

My head fell back