Spatial Feelings Studio
RCA advanced masters elective
2024-25
Space
Feeling
Architecture
Research
Sound
Pedagogy
RCA advanced masters elective
2024-25
Space
Feeling
Architecture
Research
Sound
Pedagogy
The 2024-25 Spatial Feelings studio
Royal College of Art London
Dr Adam Kaasa
Winter Term (Jan-April 2025)
(elective offered to advanced masters student cross-college at teh RCA: MFA Arts and Humanities, MFA Communications, MDes Design Future, MEd Creative Education, Master of Research (MRes), and MArch Design Practice)
Guest Lecturers: Jen Bulcraig, Ilā, Stefan Jovanović, Martin Hargraeves, The Bata Heritage Centre
***
2024-25 Focus
In 2025 students are working with sound, noise, field recordings and the sonic to explore the layers of emotion, feeling, and affect within, across and beyond spaces. To ground the work, students were introduced to Sadler’s Wells East in the Olympic Park, London, and connect a space within or beyond its boundaries to consider labour, pleasure, performance, and urban change.
Students are tasked with creating a 1-min sound piece in response to a place of their choosing within a 15 minute radius of Sadler’s Wells East. They receive DAW training by producer Jen Bulcraig, explorations of quantum computing, and cutting edge quantum synth plug-ins from sound artist Ilā, an introduction to expanded choreography from Martin Hargraeves, and a drift score from Stefan Jovanović. The project culminates with a collective in-situ performance of some 31 sound pieces on 21 March 2025.
We will joined for the performance by current cohort members of the Rose Choreographic School, and the sound pieces will form one-half of the first of three mix-tapes commissioned by SOUND@RCA, the first cross-college research cluster at the RCA focussing on sound (forthcoming summer 2025).
Description
This unit explores spatial feelings as emotional geography. The unit works across scale tying feelings to affective economies like the large of election campaigns or protest movements, to the vastness of the experience of shared grief or loss and the optimism of ambition, or to the minor of the monotony of the everyday. We consider how the terrain of emotions – amplified through art and humanities practice, spatial practice, media and the urban – not only move us but move the world.
Approaching emotions through the speculative, the fabulated and the structure of new forms of narration, or through interruptions, glitches and ruptured registers this unit reveals the history and present of how spatialised art practice frames and forms the feelings that shape our contemporary social life, intergenerational relations and equalities.
Feelings matter. This unit interrogates this in a literal sense. Feelings matter because they emerge from a relationship to the material worlds around us. And they matter because they have an effect on those same material worlds. Feelings are bound to place - and so what we feel about a place - matters. How we feel about it can be conditioned in language and in aesthetics. And how these land on our bodies changes dramatically based on a multitude of factors. There are emotional geographies that we live in and these geographies are unequally distributed across intersectional factors of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, geography and other factors.
This matters in profound ways: what we feel in a city or a site organises spectacle, connection, capital, demolition, 'regeneration' and so much else. While emotions may be democratic in the sense that many of us can feel a wide range of them a question remains both of how they end up 'mattering' in the world - what effect these have on the bodies that feel them, how often they come to feel them.
This unit is organised around situating work in relation to structures of feeling. Over the course of the unit, work in progress will be re-sited in various locations, and in relation to various structures across the city - physical and social. The affective encounter between site and situation will organise an ongoing discussion of the work in relation to shifting emotional geographies and demonstrate the ways in which art, space and feeling are co-constituting. A final group presentation of works will act as the assessment for this course and will present the affective journeys of the work creating narratives of spatial feeling.
Royal College of Art London
Dr Adam Kaasa
Winter Term (Jan-April 2025)
(elective offered to advanced masters student cross-college at teh RCA: MFA Arts and Humanities, MFA Communications, MDes Design Future, MEd Creative Education, Master of Research (MRes), and MArch Design Practice)
Guest Lecturers: Jen Bulcraig, Ilā, Stefan Jovanović, Martin Hargraeves, The Bata Heritage Centre
***
2024-25 Focus
In 2025 students are working with sound, noise, field recordings and the sonic to explore the layers of emotion, feeling, and affect within, across and beyond spaces. To ground the work, students were introduced to Sadler’s Wells East in the Olympic Park, London, and connect a space within or beyond its boundaries to consider labour, pleasure, performance, and urban change.
Students are tasked with creating a 1-min sound piece in response to a place of their choosing within a 15 minute radius of Sadler’s Wells East. They receive DAW training by producer Jen Bulcraig, explorations of quantum computing, and cutting edge quantum synth plug-ins from sound artist Ilā, an introduction to expanded choreography from Martin Hargraeves, and a drift score from Stefan Jovanović. The project culminates with a collective in-situ performance of some 31 sound pieces on 21 March 2025.
We will joined for the performance by current cohort members of the Rose Choreographic School, and the sound pieces will form one-half of the first of three mix-tapes commissioned by SOUND@RCA, the first cross-college research cluster at the RCA focussing on sound (forthcoming summer 2025).
Description
This unit explores spatial feelings as emotional geography. The unit works across scale tying feelings to affective economies like the large of election campaigns or protest movements, to the vastness of the experience of shared grief or loss and the optimism of ambition, or to the minor of the monotony of the everyday. We consider how the terrain of emotions – amplified through art and humanities practice, spatial practice, media and the urban – not only move us but move the world.
Approaching emotions through the speculative, the fabulated and the structure of new forms of narration, or through interruptions, glitches and ruptured registers this unit reveals the history and present of how spatialised art practice frames and forms the feelings that shape our contemporary social life, intergenerational relations and equalities.
Feelings matter. This unit interrogates this in a literal sense. Feelings matter because they emerge from a relationship to the material worlds around us. And they matter because they have an effect on those same material worlds. Feelings are bound to place - and so what we feel about a place - matters. How we feel about it can be conditioned in language and in aesthetics. And how these land on our bodies changes dramatically based on a multitude of factors. There are emotional geographies that we live in and these geographies are unequally distributed across intersectional factors of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, geography and other factors.
This matters in profound ways: what we feel in a city or a site organises spectacle, connection, capital, demolition, 'regeneration' and so much else. While emotions may be democratic in the sense that many of us can feel a wide range of them a question remains both of how they end up 'mattering' in the world - what effect these have on the bodies that feel them, how often they come to feel them.
This unit is organised around situating work in relation to structures of feeling. Over the course of the unit, work in progress will be re-sited in various locations, and in relation to various structures across the city - physical and social. The affective encounter between site and situation will organise an ongoing discussion of the work in relation to shifting emotional geographies and demonstrate the ways in which art, space and feeling are co-constituting. A final group presentation of works will act as the assessment for this course and will present the affective journeys of the work creating narratives of spatial feeling.
Images from the Spatial Feelings studio, RCA, 2025.