Transforming (Critical) Practices projects
Student work
Drawing on individual case studies and research files, the Transforming Critical Practices module concludes with a collectively organised public event.
Pursuing both individual research and collaborative group work, students have explored a range of investigative formats – from docu-fiction to public symposia and from complex mapping projects to online wikis – to address the changing ways in which contemporary critical practices are engaged in transforming the logics of economic investment, social organisation and cultural meaning-making.
These works have been presented online as well as in self-organised exhibitions, booklets and public events. Venues that have hosted these presentations include galleries, clubs and cultural initiatives across London as diverse as Grow Tottenham, Field, DIY Space for London, Shunt and Gasworks.
Addressing the multiple dimensions of ongoing cultural transformation, these events have engaged with discourses on environmental change, technological restructuring, networked creativity, contemporary public culture, and social and political movements.
Quote from the invitation to a public presentation by the #postcapitalist Reading Group formed by students at DIY Space for London:
“Be prepared. But there is nothing to prepare.
Does a book about post-capitalism tell us any more about post-capitalism than an image of that same book, on a coffee table, on a shelf? ‘A #postcapitalist Reading Group’ is a reading group without the preparatory reading. Upon arrival, participants receive not a text of post-capitalism, but an image #postcapitalism. Our placing of the term is open-ended and un-fixed: let us play.”
