Ines Iragui

This project was born from a year spent more online than ever, where I relied heavily on the internet as my means of communication and interaction.

I grew more aware of the disconnect between our nature of growth, complexity and ephemerality, and the internet being a space of almost infinite archiving and permanence, where discourse can be stored, edited, shared easily and endlessly. Along with this, the capacity of social media to make each one of us author and publisher on a small or massive scale, brings a dimension of curation and performance to what we choose to share and how we will be read. It’s a new paradigm of communication, distinct from our previous patterns of conversation and speech.

I started this project as a way to reach out and see if these reflections resonated, if others were overthinking this as much as I was. The aim was to provide a space for dialogue, and create tools to understand and navigate these online dilemmas.

Within this space, I invite the audience to anonymously share their experiences and relationship with online communication and social media through a set of prompts. Through these accumulated responses, we can start to build a collective archive of the complex, curious experiences of living and sharing ourselves online, and embrace more vulnerability and transparency in the way we approach the topic of speech on the internet.

In addition to a more text-based space for discussion, I wanted to design a tool to visually represent the emotional context that is lacking from our online platforms. An added layer of information attached to posts, in the way the tone of voice of a speaker would inform their speech.

Throughout this project, I reached out to my community online and offline for input, to gage how widely relevant some questions felt to others' relationship with the internet and social media. I found great insights in these moments of feedback, and am grateful for the generous honesty of those who helped build this project.

My hope for this project is that it engages the audience in a conversation from which they’ll leave with a greater consideration for the emotional context that may inform their -and others’- online communication.

Emotion is just one lens to look at how information is conveyed online, but I hope this work will be a starting point for more development on these questions, as well as a resource for research on online behaviour. I'm already considering the ways to grow and evolve this visual language further into implementations beyond this project.

Throughout last year, I’ve worked on a series of layered lettering designs inspired by the Rorschach test, conceptually and practically. I drew from the symmetrical, spontaneous shape generation involved, as well as the interpretation of an abstract image, often reading hidden meanings and symbolism in the organic shapes.

These feature characters of the latin alphabet, abstract shapes granted meaning. They’re created using an automated symmetry tool, the digital counterpart of the folded paper and ink of the original test, and layered to generate more colour and shape variation.

These designs were made digitally, and are transposed to silkscreen print, a fitting medium to explore the materiality of layering colour and shape, and a welcome return to practicing by hand with specialist equipment after a long stretch of screen-only, in-bedroom creation. These prints are tangible, tactile expression of a playful part of my practice, and an opportunity to say goodbye to the RCA studios.

This is a limited edition, featuring 4 layers of handprinted colour on an A4 format, each individually signed and numbered. There are still some available to purchase, if you are interested, you can find a Shopify link at the top of my page, and please don't hesitate to reach out for any questions.

Talk Shop is a student group from the Visual Communication program, born from the process of establishing our practices and situating our work professional spaces. 

Our goal was to create a welcoming, informal space for peer-led learning, solidarity and community, where students could candidly discuss making a living from creative practices. These conversations, interviews and workshops facilitated learning from each other’s experiences, sharing tips, fears, and granting each other perspective on the journey that is a creative career. But they also highlighted the need for support and information around the practical realities of creative work, employment, and immigration.

During this event, we’ll focus on one issue : the difficulty of accessing creative freedom and fulfilment in our creative studies while feeling bound by external administrative and financial pressures. Creative courses are spaces where we seek creative freedom, to grow conceptually and be innovative, but how do we access that feeling when we exist in a hostile environment, have to manage immigration statuses, financial pressures and the perspective of a challenging and highly competitive job market?

As students, we often find ourselves torn between conceptual growth and commercial viability, rather than feeling fulfilled and balanced, to the detriment of our work, our confidence, and our mental health.

We’re inviting Alec Dudson, founder of Intern to join us in this discussion. As someone who works to champion students and graduates in their creative careers, we know Alec will have valuable insight into this topic. We hope to have a well informed conversation, fuelled by our interactions with groups within and outside of the institution, with the goal to identify what resources are essential for creative courses to truly allow students creative freedom, growth and balance. 

Through this event and future Talk Shop iterations, we hope to help students get support and build community, as well as to engage institutions and help them understand their students better, and work together to generate strategies and solutions to respond to these needs. 

This conversation will be taking place virtually on the 25th of June at 10:30am UK time. You can register for it here : https://rca-ac.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwvce6urjwpH9WuZQTatue1jhiIE940fPtY

We hope to see you there!

In collaboration with Clarisse Hassan, Kristina Kapeljuh & Nayonika Ghosh