Open Studios 2023
Explore work in progress by Architecture, Communication and Design students at the Royal College of Art.
This platform launches on 3 February, with event listings available to browse from 27 January. It accompanies our Open Studios on 3&4 February 2023 across the College's three London campuses.
Find out more here
Discover Students, Collections and Events through three overarching Themes.
Throughout the history of science fiction the theme of the cyborg endures and evolves. As exemplified in Star Trek – the most successful sci-fi franchise in television – there are proposals for sentient robots , technology assimilating the living and artificial intelligence developing emotions. Each iteration explores the potential and problems in the symbiotic existence of the biological and technological.
In A Cyborg Manifesto[1], Donna Haraway proposes that acceptance of this possibility could be a way to break down binary thinking, to relish in the confusion of this bonding. To see the two not as opposites but as complementary, fused identities.
Within the creative fields many practices have embraced this ideology. Ceramics are 3D-printed and hand-painted, buildings are rendered and experienced in VR ahead of realisation and robotic arms help to develop wearable gadgets to relieve ailments.
Experience can now be mediated through a bonding of the analogue and the digital, as exemplified by some of the works appearing here. Some show us how this is happening in the present, while others speculate on how the hybridisation of these two forms may exist in the future.
