Media Studies

Situated in the Royal College of Art School of Architecture and welcoming a student cohort from across multiple spatial design disciplines, Media Studies provides a rigorous and granular examination of historical and contemporary methodologies of media research and practice.

Our collective goal is to increase critical engagement with media.

We achieve this through lectures, tutorials, and workshops in which new approaches to media are conceptualised, refined, and implemented in innovative proposals and projects. Further, Media Studies is focused on non-representational media, stepping aside from traditional architectural media such as scaled drawings, models, and renderings, and instead applying our research to the creation of discrete media objects.

In other words, this unit is not interested in projective media that represents proposed buildings or environments. Robin Evans famously stated that “architects don’t build buildings, they make drawings”¹, in other words, an architect’s practice is centred on the drawing or the representation of a building or space, not the actual building or space. Today, we could expand this observation to include contemporary representational media such as digital environments, static and dynamic analogue and digital renderings, or video and moving image, but Evans’ observation remains correct. Similarly, the media used to describe an academic project is not the building (or interior or city), it is a scaled representation, an abstracted approximation. In recent years the academic design studio has greatly expanded the range of media it deploys, but its representative nature remains. Both the professional and the student assemble media to allow those who are fluent in this language to interpret these abstractions and conflate the various drawings, models, or images into a mental composited image of the final construction. All of this is a complex, discipline-specific media process based firmly in representation.

However, media can also be non-representational.

For example, a photograph can be interpreted as a non-representational, discreet media object; most photographs are not photographs of projected future photographs. One could argue that a contact sheet or the digital interface in Bridge or Lightroom are representations of a future photograph. But the actual photograph (whether it’s analogue or digital) is a unique object with its own embedded meaning whose context is dependent on the human or machine that made the image, the time in which it was produced, its cultural location, its political consequence, etc. The photograph just is. Similarly, a painting, a performance, a handmade book or an illustration is rarely – if ever – attempting to suggest the intention of another media type. While there are always exceptions to these rules, in Media Studies we will endeavour to make work that is non-representational.

What does this mean and why is it important?

Media Studies provides a space where media experimentation can take place outside of the design studio and its demands for representation. To do this we must first establish our own context and the range of work that we will engage. This is achieved by implementing the cumulative knowledge shared and discussed in our lectures and tutorials. It is tested by our collaboration with external professionals and academics, and finally in the projects that are created. Media Studies will challenge you to create discreet media objects (film, books, sculpture, performance, text, photography, digital objects or environments, exhibitions, situations, etc.) that are representative only of themselves, whose meaning resides in the media. We will research non-representational media and the artists, designers, architects, and theorists that make and write about such work. We will create projects that challenge or strengthen those positions. We will experiment with media for the sake of the media. We will create projects that sit between, outside, or in opposition to disciplines, focusing on media as a primary site and material of and for experimentation. We will investigate the emancipatory possibilities of media. We will acknowledge media’s complicity in processes of oppression, colonisation, and imperialism, and we will work to challenge and contest these realities.

Each year, we choose a conceptual scaffold to structure our research and projects. The theme this year is proximities.

2020/21 Course Description: Proximities

The Atomic Soldiers. Directed by Morgan Knibbe, The New York Times, 2018. www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/opinion/atomic-soldiers.html

The fact that the void is not empty, mere lack or absence, matters. The question of absence is as political as that of presence. When has absence ever been an absolute givenness? Is it not always a question of what is seen, acknowledged, and counted as present, and for whom?²

“The Atomic Soldiers” (2018), by documentary filmmaker Morgan Knibbe, highlights the ongoing trauma of American servicemen placed in alarming proximity to nuclear weapons tests in New Mexico and Nevada in the 1950s and 1960s. In a particularly harrowing section of the film, several men describe the optical force of the nuclear blasts and the effects on the soldiers placed in ad hoc trenches near ground zero. The men describe being instructed to turn their backs to the blast and to place their heads in their crossed arms resting against the back of the trench. Each soldier wore only normal fatigues and WWII era steel helmets. The men describe the sensation of the light coming from behind them, through their helmets, through their heads and eyelids, through the skin and muscle of their arms, making the bones and blood vessels in their arms clearly visible. One man describes being able to see the bones of the man crouched in front of him through his own closed eyes and crossed arms.³

How did it come through all that, to get to your bones – that you could visually see them?⁴

These claims are echoed by Ric Johnstone, a motor mechanic for the RAAF stationed in Maralinga, South Australia during the British nuclear weapons tests in 1956. He was positioned at a post near Maralinga Village – home to the officers and scientists involved in the tests – and would have been 20-30 kilometres from the blast. The American men interviewed for The Atomic Soldiers were less than two kilometres from ground zero. Despite the difference in distance, Johnstone describes a sensation very similar to that of the American soldiers:

We watched the detonation of the fist bomb from the compound near the village, wearing our everyday clothes. We were told to turn our backs to the blast area. There was a countdown over loud speakers from ten seconds after which we could turn to face the blast. While our backs were to the blast there was a white flash that seemed to come through the back of one’s head and a warm feeling on the back of the neck.⁵

Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man originally from the area that would become Emu Field – the first site of British nuclear tests – describes the nuclear fallout that descended onto his family in 1953 as a black mist that partially blinding him and many others, instantly killing some, causing cancer in more. Lester was a child at the time of the tests, living in a remote community, and he and his family had no knowledge of the tests or of the dangerous proximity to their village. Lester, with heavily sunken eyes, became a prominent activist and advocate for those injured or killed by the British atomic tests.

Island Lagoon – in southeast South Australia – was the first NASA post located outside of the United States and featured a 25m antenna for deep space communications with satellites and astronauts. When the antenna was in operation, the electromagnetic transmissions were so intense that signs posted around the antenna warned the soldiers and scientists not to look directly at it while it was in operation.

At the nearby rocket testing ranges, operators of the regularly placed kinetheodolites describe the sensation of focusing so intently on a missile or rocket’s flight in their camera’s viewfinder that when the explosion occurred, they would temporarily feel the urge to flee their station, confused by the proximal inversion of the powerful telescopic lens.⁶

These disconnected episodes are emblematic of the heightened state of the optical politics within and surrounding the Cold War era. These instances transcend traditional visibility in that the normal physical operations of vision and visibility are deliberately exaggerated to the point of trauma due to the witness’ extreme proximity to the event. Vision is hyper accentuated and then permanently removed. The operative agent in these situations is the otherworldly intensity of the light produced by the nuclear explosion. This light, described with almost nostalgic awe by the American servicemen, becomes a destructive metaphor for visibility.

When it comes to nuclear landscapes, loss may not be visibly discernible, but it is not intangible. The losses emblazoned on walls: shadows of what once was become eternal … the flash so bright, the heat so hot, nearly every surface becomes a photographic plate. Loss is not absence but a marked presence, or rather a marking that troubles the divide between absence and presence.⁷

Light and visibility, though inherently connected and interdependent, are at odds in the milliseconds following a nuclear blast, and for the millennia of radioactive contamination and half-lives of the materials produced for and by the tests. The light, impossible to describe even for people who have witnessed it, stretches out its presence through the destruction of the optical devices – both human and machinic – placed in its proximity.

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The examples above describe an extreme example of the potentialities and resultants of proximity. They describe how a simple relationship – that between light and a nuclear detonation – is further complicated when coupled with instruments of visibility. From the horrific consequences on human vision, to the effects on machinic vision and the technologies necessary to witness the unnatural intensity of the light, the nuclear blasts produced inter-generational trauma. A minimal proximity in distance lead to the infinite proximity of unknown violence.

David Burns, Lead, Media Studies