Media Studies
Complementary Media Studies
MEDIA-STUDIESThe AA Media department is an experimental testing ground for exploring and interrogating the processes and tools involved in making architecture - the tools with which we speculate, manipulate and play; compute, control and test; communicate, seduce and provoke. It operates a diverse multidisciplinary programme where unexpected collisions and obsessive attention to detail expose rich seams of creative potential. By actively testing modes of production through focused acts of doing and making, AA Media presents a range of opportunities for students to develop individual practice and hone dexterity with both established and progressive media.
The department is made up of staff who possess a breadth of expertise encompassing architecture, the arts and technology and this year’s courses address a wide range of creative media including; drawing, video, photography, animation, narrative, textiles, analogue and digital fabrication, interactive and web-based media, fieldwork, curation and electronics. Alongside a compulsory curriculum for First Year and Intermediate students, the department runs full-day workshops, computer lab courses, talks and demonstrations open to curious minds from across the entire school. As techniques and concepts in fabrication, computation and representation continue to undergo radical changes, AA Media deploys a range of tools - from pencil to point-cloud - aimed at both reinforcing and reinventing the methods in which students approach design and architecture.
Unit Staff
Kate Davies
is co-founder of the art practice Liquidfactory and the nomadic design studio Unknown Fields. She has undertaken expeditions to remote parts of the globe to investigate how people use, inhabit and understand landscape. She is Unit Master of AA Diploma 6 and director of the Unknown Fields Visiting School. She has taught design studios at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Chelsea College of Art and London Metropolitan University.
Miraj Ahmed
is a painter and architect. He has taught at the AA since 2000 and is an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Art. He was also a Design Fellow at Cambridge University (2006-14).
Kasper Ax
is a Danish architect, designer and researcher. Having earned his Master degree from the Bartlett, he is currently an associate architect at LASSA Architects, and since 2009 has taught various courses and units at the Bartlett and the AA.
Charles Arsène-Henry
founded the speculative research agency White Box Black Box in 2009. He is conceiving The Library is on Fire with the Luma foundation.
Shany Barath
studied architecture at TU Delft in the Netherlands and completed her Masters at the AA, where she has taught since 2009. With Gary Freedman she established ShaGa Studio, an architecture practice at the interface of architecture, visual art, ecology and computation.
Apostolos Despotidis
is an architect and educator. He holds an M.Arch degree from the DRL in the Architectural Association and an Architect/Engineer degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Since 2012, he is working as an architect in Minimaforms London Ltd where he is involved in projects of various scales from urban planning to installation design. In parallel he is a technical course tutor in DRL in the Architectural Association and running various workshops in the UK ( AADRL, AA Unit 3, RCA) and France (ESA). He has also lectured and been invited as a juror at the Architectural Association and at the Bartlett. He is a registered architect in Greece and in the UK.
Sue Barr studied at the London College of Printing where she specialised in photographing brutalist architecture and now works internationally as an architectural photographer. As a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, her research, 'The Architecture of Transit: Beauty and Sublimity in Motorway Architecture from the Alps to Naples', is due for completion in 2015.
Valentin Bontjes van Beek
runs vbvb studio in London and has taught at the AA since 2001. His most recent commission - the realisation of a 1:1 Maison Dom-ino - is currently on display at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, before it tours to Tokyo and London.
Shin Egashira
makes art and architecture worldwide. Recent collaboration experiments include 'Time Machine' (Beyond Entropy) and 'Twisting Concrete', which intends to fuse old and new technologies. He has been conducting a series of landscape workshops in rural communities around the world. He has been teaching at the AA since 1990 and is the Unit Master of Diploma Unit 11 since 1997.
Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu
is a London-based architect and motion designer. He splits his time between running 'CtrlArchDel' studio and teaching and holding workshops on the topic of time-based media, digital cultures and animative processes in architecture.
Anderson Inge
practises architecture in London, having trained at the University of Texas at Austin, the AA and MIT. He has developed a pedagogy for drawing, which he delivers as workshops at numerous institutions, currently at the AA, and the Rural Studio.
Alex Kaiser
holds degrees from Oxford Brookes and the AA. Following these studies he brought his design, modelling and visualisation skills to the London architecture offices of Richard Rogers and Moxon Architects. He is co-founder of APK Concepts.
Antoni Malinowski
studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Chelsea Collage of Art. Since his first wall drawing installations in the mid 1980s he has worked in a variety of media. He practises in London. Alison Moffett is a practising artist originally from Tennessee. Since moving to London, she obtained an MFA from the Slade School of Fine art in 2004 and an MA in History and Critical Thinking from the AA in 2011. She is interested in the perceived world and how, through filters and rules, this is translated into a visual language. She is represented by Gallery Schleicher/Lange in Berlin.
Capucine Perrot
has been assistant curator for the Performance Programme at Tate Modern since 2010. Recent projects include 'Performance Room', a series of live performances conceived for online audiences. She was also part of the curatorial team that organised the inaugural programme of The Tanks, Tate Modern's new spaces dedicated to performance, film and installation.
Joel Newman
studied fine art at Reading University and has exhibited in the UK and abroad. He has run the AA's Audio Visual department since 1994 and has taught Video within Media Studies since 1998.
Caroline Rabourdin
is a French architect and essayist living in London. She graduated from the ENSAIS in Strasbourg, and holds a Masters in Architectural Design from the Bartlett. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Greenwich University, and a PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Arts, London.
