Themes
Discover students, collections and events through four overarching Themes that contextualise the work on the platform within the here and now. They are tied together by the suffix -ness, which is used with an adjective to say something about its state, condition, or quality of being.
Filmmaker Adam Curtis often discusses the rise of individualism in his work, a term that describes the dominance of the views and expression of the singular over the collective.1 The rise of this desire for singularity, the eschewing of group mentality, leads to a social atomisation that diminishes connectivity and dissolves groups. If a single human being can be all they need, why would they need anyone else?
The past, present and future are a trilogy of terms we hang our understanding of time upon. These fixed concepts of linear progression help us to measure journeys through events at both a local and universal scale. While these simplified labels help us understand the concept of time effectively, they don’t fully explain how we experience it. While we can use our senses to engage with most aspects of the world, what faculty do we use to gauge the passing of time?
In the works of Dr Seuss, Thing 1 and Thing 2 are chaotic entities disrupting the world around them and altering the state of materials before being captured and put away.1 They are simultaneously the thing that does the thing and the thing that has the thing done to. Within the slippery ideology of thinginess how do we define what these things are?
RCA:
ChatGPT, In no more than 200 words,1 please write an editorial piece on the theme of Consciousness (including the relationships between life, emotions and Artificial Intelligence2) within the context of an online viewing platform for artists, designers, architects and communicators graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2023.3
Give. Give again. Keep giving. Don’t stop.
This is the beginning of artist Neil Cummings’ text, Generosity, which is included in Ends Meet, a collection of texts responding to the theme of ‘exchange’ developed by RCA MA Writing students in 2014.1 This text proposes generosity as a resource we should share in abundance and not expect in return. In a world where our time and energy often feel scarce, is it possible to give without expecting to gain?