Visual Communication

As a student, you will become well-practised in interpreting ideas, events, complex data, knowledge and experiences. You will learn to translate these into artefacts, narratives or connections that might manifest across or between the physical, digital or virtual. You will learn to elicit new knowledge and create new insights through language, storytelling, tools, and materiality. Your role is to form a bridge: to make possible forms of communication that can connect people and connect ideas.

We’ll give you creative agency to explore the ideas that drive your practice. Recent work by our students has included the body in digital space, the 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 as divergent in form as in content. We embrace multidisciplinary approaches, including sound, type-design, performance, publishing, moving image, workshops, fieldwork, documentary, radio, virtual reality, comics, ceramics, happenings, drawing, walking and writing.

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

Term 1

In the unit Encounters (45 credits), 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?

You'll also take AcrossRCA (15 credits), which supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

Term 2

The Making Worlds with Others School-wide unit (15 credits) 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.

Following on from Encounters, you will begin testing the series of critical questions you’ve emerged within the unit Affinities (30 credits). 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 Core Skills unit (15 credits), which supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career.

Term 3

In the Independent Research Project (60 credits), 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. Towards the end of the programme, you will have the opportunity to participate in a collectively curated and produced public-facing activity. This could include developing a group exhibition, publication or curated events, and contributes to the body of work presented for your unit assessment.

This MA is delivered over 45 weeks.

AcrossRCA

At the RCA we are working – as artists, designers, architects, historians, writers and curators – within physical and digital worlds that are undergoing constant change, and defined by shifting complexities and interconnections. The 15-credit AcrossRCA unit supports you in working across disciplines to use creative and critical thinking and practice and collaborative approaches to respond to urgent contemporary themes.

The unit revolves around a set of thematic pillars that reflect key areas of flux, uncertainty and complexity that cut across local, global, individual and collective contexts today. Working in interdisciplinary collaborative groups, you will develop your thinking and reflections on a key issue, question or tension under the umbrella of a larger theme as you generate a creative response. The focus is on learning through the process of the collaborative development of an idea. Rather than aiming for a completed product, solution or concrete answer, AcrossRCA is about an openness to what is generated through experimentation, dialogue and reflexivity. What happens when we move across disciplinary borders and put the kinds of knowledge, experience and skills we each bring to the RCA into conversation with others?

This provides you with opportunities to:

• share and adapt approaches from your personal practices and/or discipline;
• collaborate with peers outside your programme;
• interrogate collaboration through experimenting with and reflecting on collaborative models and approaches, and thinking about what your practice means in relation to others;
• critically reflect on your responsibilities as a creative practitioner and the role of creative practice in making our understanding and experience of the world;
• position your practice and skills and what you bring to a team and larger context.

This engagement with perspectives and practices from across disciplines and across the College is designed to complement your disciplinary studies, feed back into your individual work, and provide you with a platform to thrive beyond graduation.

Core Skills

The Core Skills unit (15 credits) supports you in advancing your academic and professional skills to aid the development of your personal projects at the RCA and beyond in your professional practice and career. The unit also supports you in moving from Term 1 to the independent work you will undertake in your IRP in Term 3, as an opportunity to more deeply and systematically develop and deploy select core skills related to your practice. The transferable academic and professional skills covered in this unit reflect those required of a postgraduate student, and are adapted by Schools and programmes according to specific disciplinary perspectives and requirements. The Core Skills complement the work you are undertaking in your programme units and underpins and elevates the development of your future direction. The Core Skills will focus on specific skills most relevant to your expanded discipline, which may come under areas including inclusive, critical, sustainable and ethical approaches, the networks of knowledge, practice and communication within which your work sits, and the positioning of your practice. Throughout, the unit emphasises how these skills are situated not only disciplinarily within art, design, architecture, communication and humanities practices, but also within larger contexts, inside and in the world beyond.

The unit is informed by the following three themes:

• Making Meaning: How does questioning and contextualising inform the development of your practice? This theme builds on skills in critical and creative thinking, reflective practice, navigating complexity and research.
• Making Together: How do we think and make in dialogue and collaboration with others? This theme encompasses skills such as inclusive, ethical and sustainable practice, and peer learning and building networks.
• Making Public: How is your work and practice positioned within larger ecologies? Exploration of this theme may include developing skills in engagement, communication, entrepreneurship and leadership.