Department 21 – an experimental interdisciplinary workspace at the Royal College of Art

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.

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File Under presents Felix Janssens

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.

File Under discussion series

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.

Poster for Atti Democratici: Freiraum

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

stop. swap in progress

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setting up for the stop. swap

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.

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Hotel Oush Grab in Istanbul

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.

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Atti Democratici

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.

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Zeitkapsula 2009-2041

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 .

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DESIGN KÄMP! 2009

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 ›

And While London Burns by PLATFORM

Yesterday, together with our friend Serena we ‘performed’ the operatic audio walk And While London Burns , written by John Jordan and James Marriott and produced by PLATFORM as part of their ongoing project Unraveling the Carbon Web. In our opinion, this project is brilliant from many points of view and it represents well what we mean with “communication design”: by listening on our mp3 players to an incredibly well conceived and highly informative audio piece, we were guided through the streets and buildings of The City, and thus we discovered the relation between the oil economy and London, where the biggest and most powerful companies connected with this sector have their offices. We’re glad we were shown in such a powerful way this important part of the ‘carbon web’. We highly recommend everyone to do this walk, as it is quite hard to put into words the experience we had.

Perceptive Safari I exhibition at the Purfleet Heritage Centre

From the 7th to the 25th of June the exhibition collecting the works produced by the participants in the first Perceptive Safari was on show at the amazing Purfleet Heritage Centre , which we visited during the Safari in March. We were given a nice space next to the Dracula-section. We would like to thank Alan and Susan Gosling and all the other members of the Centre for welcoming the exhibition so warmly.

Before that, on the 10th of May we returned to the places of the Safari with our friends Ana and Matthias for a revisitation.

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DESIGN KÄMP!

We are currently organising a 5 day workshop in the mountains for a group of students of the Faculty of Design and Art of Bozen. In collaboration with Designistan , Tabea Glahs and Julia Maltry.

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Perceptive Safari 1 exhibition / opening

The exhibition collecting the works created by the participants of the first Perceptive Safari in response to the landscape along the Thames in Essex will be on in the Hockney Gallery at the RCA from the 5th to the 8th of May as part of the Design Without Labels exhibition.

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The Skills Workshop

In the frame of the Design Without Labels exhibition we organised The Skills Workshop. Sharing skills of any kind is better than keeping them for yourself!

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Borderline Europe – Ceuta

During our trip to Morocco in the Easter break we went to Ceuta, one of the two small Spanish enclaves in the North of the country in order to make a video about that part of the controversial southern boarder of the EU. The initial idea was to walk along the 9 Km long fence that separates Europe from Africa, but because of some problems we had with the Spanish boarder guard, for us it was only possible to film the fence in Benzù .
This should be the final cut:

MAP/making

We are currently taking part in the MAP/making (Music Art Performance) project, a collaboration between the RCA and the Guildhall School of Music. With a group of visual artists and musicians we are working towards a series of three collective audio-visual performances that will take place in Bath in the context of the Bath Music Festival at the beginning of June. Together with the cellists Tara Franks and Heather Truesdall and with the electronic musician Jo Willis we came up with a live piece on the theme of trauma, as the overall topic of the event is the mistreatment of children.

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14.995 at Friends of the Divided Mind

This Saturday, from 2 to 6 pm a part of 14.995 will be screened in the context of the Office of Real Time Activity , an experimental institution, which exists for the duration of the exhibition Friends of the Divided Mind , curated by 2nd year MA students in Curating Contemporary Art at the RCA. The Office of Real Time Activity is organised by Sepake Angiama, Harriet Godwin, Pamela Prado and Lisa Schmidt.
4 hours of Palestine-time-synchronised video and sound + some humus, falafel, pita bread and mint tea for those who will visit us.

Photos by Pamela Prado and Sepake Angiama

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Perceptive Safari 1

On the 14th and 15th of March 2009, our first Perceptive Safari took place. With a group of 22 people we walked from Rainham to Grays, along the Thames in Essex, on the outskirts of London.

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At the Energy Cafe

With the Design Without Labels group we spent a day building stuff at the Energy Cafe , a project-space run by Amy Plant and Ella Gibbs .