We are taking part in the project Angolazioni Urbane , which will take place in Mestre (Venice) from September 13th to 18th. We will produce an intervention in via Piave , one of Mestre’s most central streets, which is undergoing an important moment of deep social reconfiguration.

Next Monday Francesco Jodice will present a few of our projects in Milan at Careof DOCVA (Documentation Center for Visual Arts) in the context of a series of events titled Photography? Encounters with young authors from photography schools, by Careof DOCVA and Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, curated by Chiara Agnello and Matteo Balduzzi.

Monday, 5 July, 6.30pm
Careof Docva
Fabbrica del Vapore, via Procaccini 4 Milan

Here a few thoughts instigated by the book, which we pinned down while formulating our contribution:

For Immediate Release:

Neville Brody: Royal College of Art “de facto natural home for all visual communications” as he accepts position as Head of Communication Art & Design

LONDON, 22 March, 2010 — Neville Brody has been named as the new Head of the Department of Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, taking up the position on 1 January 2011. He will be succeeding Professor Dan Fern, who retires at the end of the academic year.

read more ›

On the 10th of March 2010, after the presentations of the short-listed candidates for the position of new Head of Department of Communication Art & Design at the Royal College of Art, 44 students (51% of CA&D MA students) gathered in order to expressed their voice and preference.
To every candidate each of the present students assigned a number from one to seven. One represents the preferred candidate, seven the least. Summing up the results, these are the avarage points each candidate was assigned and the avarage ‘mark’ he got.

These results were forwarded to the selection committee together with a document which explained in more detail what was discussed in the group. Students were assured that their opinions would be taken into consideration.

From the organisers: “Please have your minds open for a very different way of looking into design practice.” Thanks Joana and Paul.

After 6 weeks, the actual ‘physical’ part of the project is over and the second floor of the Stevens Building at the RCA is empty again. We’ll continue working back in our studios on the different elements which should permit the discussions which emerged in and around 21 to continue also in the future: a publication with a critical review and a proposal for a future interdisciplinary space at the college, an installation for the final shows, a symposium to happen in the same occasion and different possible future reincarnations of the initiative. 21 set different wheels in motion so check the blog from time to time for updates.

Department 21 , the project we’re currently spending all our time and energies on, will be running for 2 more weeks. There will be less events and more time to do work, interact and collaborate. We also thought about reconfiguring the space for the time left. We started putting together some thoughts for the publication which will result from the experiment. Working on this might end up absorbing the few months we still have left at the RCA.

Join us today, Friday the 4th of December 2009 at 1pm for a roundtable discussion about interdisciplinary practice led by Andreas Lang from public works with guests Celine Condorelli (London-based architect and author of support structures ), Sarah Teasley (design historian and tutor at History of Design, RCA) and Richard Wentworth (Head of Sculpture, RCA)

The roundtable discussion will look at the nature of initiatives originating from within institutional settings and the potential of interdisciplinary collaborations within educational institutions such as the RCA.

The event will run from 1pm this Friday the 4th of December 2009 in Lecture Theater 2 at the RCA. Visitors to the RCA can enter from the main entrance, which looks onto the Royal Albert Hall and follow the signs guiding visitors to Lecture Theater 2.

www.department21.net

FILE UNDER:
Design monographs
Otl Aicher
Jan van Toorn
Anthony Froshaug

MARKUS RATHGEB
RICK POYNOR
ROBIN KINROSS
Wednesday, 2 December 2009
Performing Arts Lab
Stevens Building – 1st floor
3.30pm

Poster by Ray O’Meara and Mark El-khatib.

Markus Rathgeb was educated as a graphic designer in Germany, Australia and the UK. He moved to London in 1997 to co-found alligator design and started a Ph.D. research at the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. After completing his Ph.D. dissertation, “Otl Aicher: Design as a Method of Action” in 2001 he moved back to Germany to help establishing the Department of Mediadesign in Ravensburg, being the first design course at the University of Cooperative Education in Germany, where he is currently Head of Department and lectures applied design methods.

Rick Poynor is a writer on design, media and visual culture. He was the founding editor of Eye magazine, and is a contributing editor and columnist of Print magazine in New York. In 2003 he co-founded Design Observer, which rapidly became a leading design weblog. He lectures internationally on design matters and has been a Visiting Professor and a Research Fellow at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2002 he researched and edited a special issue of Eye about Australian graphic design. Poynor’s books include Typographica (2001), Obey the Giant (2001), an essay collection, No More Rules (2003), a critical study of graphic design and postmodernism, and Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties (2004) to accompany the Communicate exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, which he curated. His most recent book is Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008), a study of the radical Dutch designer.

Robin Kinross. After graduating (1975) and postgraduating (1979) from the Department of Typography at the University of Reading, he began to do ‘editorial typography’ (editing and design in one process) as well as write about typography. In 1980, while still living in Reading, he published the first book under the imprint of Hyphen Press: What is a designer by Norman Potter. In 1982 he moved to London, did behind-the-scenes work for Pluto Press’s political atlases and began to write journalism, especially for the magazine Blueprint in its golden period of the late 1980s. When his book Modern typography came out in 1992, this signalled the start of Hyphen Press as the full-time occupation that it is now. Impatient with authors slow to complete promised works, he resorted to publishing his own words again in the books Unjustified texts (2002) and The transformer (2009).

www.decodejerusalem.net

Department 21 will be a temporary, physical space established by students as an experiment in interdisciplinary practice. In January 2010 – once Painting has moved to Howie Street – Department 21 will salvage Floor 2 of the Stevens Building. Department 21 seeks to explore whether this territory, freed by the departure of one department and the anticipation of another, can become a new kind of conceptual and social space as well as physical one.
    For one month only, students from all departments of the College are invited to use Department 21 to develop independent work and cultivate collaborative projects in a multi-purpose environment. Students interested in fully inhabiting Department 21 will have the opportunity to generate and take advantage of a truly multi-disciplinary creative hub. Whilst continuing to develop independent projects, students will be able to share thoughts in cross-disciplinary crits, bring in tutors for open tutorials, participate in workshops, invite outside lecturers, join informal events and explore how their practice evolves in an open and discursive environment.

Beyond the existing group of 10 students, Department 21 can offer one space per existing college department. Spaces will be allocated on a first-come, first-serve basis through an email application process which will be advertised to all students and will run from 10am on Thursday 3rd until 5pm Friday 4th December. Any spaces which remain available by the close of submission will be allocated at random from the waiting list. A flexible, communal area within Department 21 will offer further opportunities for more students and tutors who wish to benefit from a radical and productive environment without fully inhabiting the space on a day-to-day basis. It will be expressed to students that this is not an opportunity to gain extra studio space, but a challenging and progressive exercise for open-minded students wanting to share and develop knowledge and practice.

By testing the possibilities of a cross-disciplinary initiative, Department 21 aims to be challenging, inclusive, radical and productive, and act as an experiment through which future inter-departmental scenarios might be determined.

www.department21.net

Department 21 is a project we are developing in collaboration with Carmen Billows (Curating Contemporary Art), Callum Cooper (Animation), Melissa Gamwell (Ceramics & Glass), Polly Hunter (History of Design), Sara Muzio (Animation), Anaïs Tondeur (Textiles) and Ottilie Ventiroso and Oliver Wainwright (from StudioSuperniche, Architecture).

FILE UNDER:
consensus or confrontation
consensus in confrontation
conflicting realities / common we
identity allergy
in the gaze of the other we know who we are

FELIX JANSSENS
18-11-09
Performing Arts Lab
Stevens Building / RCA
2.30pm

Felix Janssens is a Dutch graphic designer, who in 1992 founded the Sober Thinking Society. In 1999 he founded the design office TEAM TCHM, which has been operative until 2008 as an interdisciplinary network of designers, architects, writers and philosophers. In 2008 he became creative director at Total Identity. Furthermore he is an advising expert at No Academy.

Poster by Ray O’Meara and Mark El-khatib.

We are currently involved in the organisation of a lecture & discussion series around visual communication and with a focus on critical practice as part of the File Under series happening every Wednesday at the RCA. As a first guest, we invited Rick Poynor.

Ray O’Meara and Mark El-khatib are taking care of the communication of the series and designed the posters above.

Our democratic act consists in the creation of a neutral space in the city. As designers, this time we consciously resist the temptation to send more pre-packed images and slogans into the public space – for the mental wellbeing of the citizens. The sum of all these posters in Bozen/Bolzano generates a liberated public space of about 700 square meters.

http://www.lungomare.org/attidemocratici

Go to the project ›

After handing in our dissertations, we’re spending the weekend setting up the Hockney Gallery for the Skills Workshop’s sequel: stop. swap, a week of cross-departmental workshops and talks at the RCA in collaboration with our friend Ana Viegas. stop. swap represents an attempt to temporarily lower the barriers that at the moment separate the 20 departments of the college one from another. Together with Iain Howlett, George Fereday and Kieren Jones from Design Products, today and tomorrow we’ll be building exquisite furniture recycling some of the wood used for last RCA Summer Show.

Here is the program of the week:

FRIDAY 9 / TIME
9:30 Breakfast with rector Paul Thompson .
10:30 Adnan Lalani, Silas Money, Callum Cooper and Mike Please from Animation hold different workshops with different techniques: praxinoscopes, drawing on film, pixelation.
14:00 Continuing the morning workshops; Animation Attack with Callum Cooper and friends; Presentation of 3d image facilities at Design London.
16:30 2nd year Animation students show their 1st year films.
+ Celebration of the end of the week at the Art Bar.

Go to the project ›

An overview of Decolonizing Architecture is being exhibited at the 11th Istanbul Biennial . Our contribution to it, Hotel Oush Grab, is included in the Book of Activism.

Go to the project ›

Our friends Angelika and Daniele from Lungomare invited us to participate with a poster in the event Atti Democratici , whose third part is being co-organised and hosted by Lungomare in Bozen/Bolzano from the 16th to the 30th of October.
Atti Democratici is an applied research on the relationship between Art and Democracy, developed in a network of artists, curators and theorists.

At Lungomare:

Azioni Democratiche
Three days performance & presentations

with
Ei Arakawa & Nikolas Gambaroff – New York
Shilpa Gupta – India
Yael Davids – Israel / Netherlands

 

Digital democratico
Discussion panel and video screening

DaGaza.org by Stefano Savona
Videocrazy by Erik Gandini
Come un uomo sulla Terra by Riccardo Biadene, Andrea Segre, Dagmawi Yimer; directed by Andrea Segre and Dagmawi Yimer in collaboration with Riccardo Biadene
OP- ordine pubblico by Segreteria Genoa Legal Forum, Carlo Bachschmidt

 

On paper
Poster-exhibition about art&democracy in the public space

with
Žiga Testen – Maastricht / Slovenia
Lauren Alexander – South Africa
Jack Henrie Fisher & Popahna Brandes – Brussels / New York
Brave New Alps – Italy

 

Design negation
Discussion Panel

with
Daniel van der Velden
Cornelia Durka
Merijn Oudenampsen
Ghalia Elsrakbi
Ziga Testen
to be confirmed: Georgios Papadopoulos

 

Volare O O
Free-press magazine about the twelve principles of the Italian Constitution
Franco Arminio
Cesare Pietroiusti & Maria Rosa Sossai
Thomas Kager
Marco Angelucci

From the 27th to the 31st of July we run one of the four “Summer Labs”, which every year are organised by the Museion – Museum of modern and contemporary art of Bozen-Bolzano .

Go to the project ›

Last week we finally gathered with a group of young designers in Fabio’s small summer house in the Italian Alps to reflect and discuss about the figure of the designer in contemporary society.
The week was intense and inspiring and being out in nature the whole time made our days really special.

Go to the project and download the documentation ›