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.

In the Event of Making: Uncovering Alternative Modes of Communication in the Work of Anni Albers
Larissa Nowicki

Project overview —

This practice-led research investigates Anni Albers’s essays and tests how well her practical and theoretical concepts inform, respond, and stretch to meet challenges within today’s field of communication art and design. A practice-based methodology grounded in contemporary fine art making is constructed according to Albers’s material-based directives and informed by “thinking through doing” philosophy drawing from Ingold (2013). Performed by the visual artist/researcher’s hand in the art studio, this conceptual approach to research seeks to discover new interpretations of Albers’s collection writings published in On Design (1961) through the experience of making with materials opposed to traditional qualitative methods of historical text analysis (Smith and Dean 2014). Each art project, with its nuances and insights, becomes an engagement with the materiality of ideas.

References
Ingold, Tim. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge.
Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean. (2014) Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Biography

Visual artist and researcher, Larissa Nowicki, is currently a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, London where she received an MA in Communication Art and Design. She holds a BA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design. Her practice-led research is performed by hand through gendered processes, which have long been associated with marginalized communities (i.e. weaving, sewing). Her practice across art and design draws from a material based non-linguistic form of communication. In her research she is developing alternative practice-based methods for expanding feminist scholarship within art history through hands-on making with materials. Nowicki’s artwork is held in both private and public collections. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

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

Comments are closed.

itinerant space

Issue 2: iterations

Search

In the Event of Making: Uncovering Alternative Modes of Communication in the Work of Anni Albers
Larissa Nowicki

Project overview —

This practice-led research investigates Anni Albers’s essays and tests how well her practical and theoretical concepts inform, respond, and stretch to meet challenges within today’s field of communication art and design. A practice-based methodology grounded in contemporary fine art making is constructed according to Albers’s material-based directives and informed by “thinking through doing” philosophy drawing from Ingold (2013). Performed by the visual artist/researcher’s hand in the art studio, this conceptual approach to research seeks to discover new interpretations of Albers’s collection writings published in On Design (1961) through the experience of making with materials opposed to traditional qualitative methods of historical text analysis (Smith and Dean 2014). Each art project, with its nuances and insights, becomes an engagement with the materiality of ideas.

References
Ingold, Tim. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge.
Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean. (2014) Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Biography

Visual artist and researcher, Larissa Nowicki, is currently a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, London where she received an MA in Communication Art and Design. She holds a BA in Graphic Design from Rhode Island School of Design. Her practice-led research is performed by hand through gendered processes, which have long been associated with marginalized communities (i.e. weaving, sewing). Her practice across art and design draws from a material based non-linguistic form of communication. In her research she is developing alternative practice-based methods for expanding feminist scholarship within art history through hands-on making with materials. Nowicki’s artwork is held in both private and public collections. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

First engagement with materiality of ideas — Handwoven maquette. Text pages from old books interwoven with an image of Anni Albers's weaving, Red Meander, 1954.

Reading and writing Anni Albers — As the visual artist / researcher my initial attempt to absorb the meaning of Albers's essays is through the practice of writing her words out by hand.

The residue of making — Unexpected traces of the gestures from making a previous project remain and become a catalyst for the next iteration of practice-led experiments.

Deconstructing the Pocket Library of Great Art — Parameters for new projects are derived from the pre-existing book design while the paper serves as foundation material for new artwork.

Thinking through doing — The material accretion of new narratives is performed through the gendered practice of stitching over a duration of weeks. New ideas take time.

The contribution to knowledge resides in the practice output — Here the dominant narrative of western art history is subverted by the simple stitch. Sometimes actions speak louder than words.