Visual Communication

You will become well practiced in interpreting ideas, events, complex data, knowledge and experiences, translating these into artefacts, narratives or connections that might manifest across or between the physical, digital or the virtual. Through language, storytelling, tools & materiality you will learn to elicit new knowledge and in turn create new insights. Your role as a communicator of such experiences is to form a bridge; to create forms of communication that can connect people and connect ideas. Referring to these exchanges as ‘conversations’ expands the possibilities for social accountability and creative consciousness.

As a student on the programme you are given the creative agency to explore the ideas that drive your practice. Recent work has been as diverse as: the body in digital space, gentrification of communities, immigration rights, intangible cultural heritage, feminist and LGBTQ+ histories, media archaeology, the living archive, material labour, the privatisation of public space, protest, racial justice, visions of utopia and more.

Our open and inclusive vision of the practice of communication produces work that is every bit as divergent in form as in content, embracing multidisciplinary approaches including sound, type-design,, performance, publishing, moving image, workshops, fieldwork, documentary, radio, virtual reality, comics, ceramics, happenings, drawing, walking and writing.

We invite you to join a conversation based on our shared belief in humankind and the power of art and design to empower and transform.

The programme is delivered across three terms and includes a combination of programme, School and College units.

Term 1

In term 1, you will study the Encounters unit. Together we will develop ‘conversations’ within a critical framework that aims to question existing ideas and models of knowledge production. By staging encounters with other disciplines, communities, and sites, we will examine and expand on lived experience, motivation and practice. We will formulate inquiries that unsettle the familiar and ask — What if?

Across Terms 1 and 2, you will participate in AcrossRCA, the College-wide unit. See below for more details.

Term 2

Following on from Encounters, you will begin testing the series of critical questions you’ve emerged with in the unit Affinities. You will identify which discussions you want to participate in and practice listening and connecting with others on a non-individualistic level. You will start a dialogue with the people, objects and ideas you want to engage with and be expected to connect to them with care and purpose. You will consider new modes and methods relevant to your research, and focus on making, exchanging and experimenting with this knowledge by working collectively.

You'll also take the School-wide unit Making Worlds with Others. This unit Will allow you to work alongside students within and across the School. Working from the perspective of your individual practices and disciplines, you will develop a project that engages with others and/or creates mutual exchanges of ideas and understandings, with the intention to create critically engaged situations and/or outcomes resulting in convivial knowledge exchange. Through collaborative learning and making the unit will support you in understanding knowledge exchange and public engagement and how you are to situate your own practice in these territories. The unit will also ask you to question how socially engaged practice can contribute to cultural understanding, co-researching and co-creating methods for knowing with, not knowing about.

Term 3

Independent Research Project. Here we ask you to focus on locating and establishing yourself and your work in the external contexts in which you seek to engage and connect your practice to emerging critical discourses. You will enact the critical frameworks, methods and tools you have developed through the programme.

Situated at the core of your RCA student experience, this ambitious interdisciplinary College- wide AcrossRCA unit supports how you respond to the challenges of complex, uncertain and changing physical and digital worlds by engaging you in a global creative network that draws on expertise within and beyond the institution. It provides an extraordinary opportunity for you to:

• make connections across disciplines
• think critically about your creative practice
• develop creative networks within and beyond the College
• generate innovative responses to complex problems
• reflect on how to propose ideas for positive change in local and/or global contexts.

AcrossRCA launches with a series of presentations from internationally acclaimed speakers that will encourage you to think beyond the discourses of art, architecture, communication, and design, and extend into other territories such as economics, ethics, science, engineering, medicine or astrophysics.

In interdisciplinary teams you will be challenged to use your intellect and imagination to respond to urgent contemporary themes, providing you with an opportunity to develop innovative and disruptive thinking, critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and demonstrate the contribution that the creative arts can make to our understanding and experience of the world. This engagement with interdisciplinary perspectives and practices is designed both to complement your disciplinary studies and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.