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

Call for submissions

Guide to submitting

Peer review panel

Application form: peer review panel member

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

Website design: Regular Practice.
Site development: Mads Kullberg
Copyright © 2021-2024, Royal College of Art

Contributor Biographies

Notes from the Editors
Karen Bosy, Nick Bell, Kirsty Smith and 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 pandemic-free world in 2019, 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.

Towards an uncausal practice of visual communication
Charlotte Lengersdorf

Project overview —

This practice-based PhD investigates an approach to visual communication practice that is in antithesis to the predominant Western principles of rationality, determination and duality. Its departure point is the disintegration of semantics and writing in asemic writing. Practice-based work is centred around interactive and playful computer interfaces and the practice of coding. The neologism of uncausality allows for an assemblage of practice, theory and methodology that explores aspects of nonsense, the unknown and the undetermined in their relationship to thought and action. Freed from the confines of their specific discipline they become part of the larger effort of this research to introduce a terminology that escapes fixed categories and tradition. This research ultimately aims to consider visual communication practice as intertwined with constantly shifting social, technological and cultural processes.

Biography

I am a visual communicator, researcher and lecturer born in Germany and based in London. I specialise in type design, interactivity and critical theory with specific emphasis on the nonsensical, undetermined and unknown. I hold a BA from Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. I am currently a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art, funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

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

itinerant space

Issue 1: pilot

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Towards an uncausal practice of visual communication
Charlotte Lengersdorf

Project overview —

This practice-based PhD investigates an approach to visual communication practice that is in antithesis to the predominant Western principles of rationality, determination and duality. Its departure point is the disintegration of semantics and writing in asemic writing. Practice-based work is centred around interactive and playful computer interfaces and the practice of coding. The neologism of uncausality allows for an assemblage of practice, theory and methodology that explores aspects of nonsense, the unknown and the undetermined in their relationship to thought and action. Freed from the confines of their specific discipline they become part of the larger effort of this research to introduce a terminology that escapes fixed categories and tradition. This research ultimately aims to consider visual communication practice as intertwined with constantly shifting social, technological and cultural processes.

Biography

I am a visual communicator, researcher and lecturer born in Germany and based in London. I specialise in type design, interactivity and critical theory with specific emphasis on the nonsensical, undetermined and unknown. I hold a BA from Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. I am currently a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at the Royal College of Art, funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

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