Architectural Association Postgraduate Diploma in Spatial Performance and Design

AAIS, Exquisite Corpse Cologne, Spatial performance at the DQE in Cologne 2011 with Dancers of the 'New Movement Collective'. © image Henrietta Williams (AAIS 2011). Image courtesy Architectural Association.

The AA Interprofessional Studio is a post-professional course leading to a Postgraduate Diploma in Spatial Performance and Design. Functioning as a creative office, the course explores alternative forms of collaboration between the multiple creative professions through the research, conception, design and implementation/production of a series of genre-defying spatial performances and constructions. By creating unique project-events that form the basis for continued discussion, the AAIS provides students with a starting point for individual careers within a new overarching discipline, and continues its attempt to make the impossible possible. We are looking for musicians, dancers, filmmakers, quantum physicists and all other artists and designers that want to work across disciplines.

The Postgraduate Diploma in Spatial Performance and Design aims to create and define spatial arrangements and objects through performance and interaction. The studio utilizes and links creative intelligence across multiple disciplines to achieve unique spatial conditions and generate a lasting interprofessional ethos among its participants. This year the studio will create a series of three events that form the framework of the creative process. These events are the driving force behind the development of our creativity and innovation. Through the overlap of the various disciplines that are involved with our work, the projects are by default experimental and often unprecedented. The series will explore the spatial and creative potential of three different locations throughout Europe. Each event will last between 24 hours and several months and attempts to create a continuously transforming environment that forms a 'temporal cinematic choreography' between architecture, dance, film, design, photography, fashion and art.

Challenging the frontiers of working in between art, architecture and performance, the AA Interprofessional Studio aims to expose a hidden 'worknet' between multiple professions and their products. The studio—operating as an interdisciplinary creative office where knowledge exchange is one of the core points of focus—reaches professions and stimulates students to develop a communication language across creative disciplines. It acts as an invitation to build a network of professionals and experts from creative backgrounds as diverse, and complimentary, as performance, design, music, film, photography, fashion, communication and curation through workshops and symposia, combining each creative language to work and study within the AA on concrete projects reflective of the various fields of research. Contrary to typical interdisciplinary design approaches, where individual professions remain in their respective field of expertise, AAIS seeks to place students outside their conventional comfort zone, acquiring knowledge from other disciplines that will ultimately influence, extend and adjust their own creative processes and practice. AA Inter-professional Studio, open since January 2009, is the first course at the AA to invite professionals from creative disciplines to take part in the design process of each inter-related project.

The AA is an Approved Institution and Affiliated Research Centre of The Open University (OU), UK. All taught graduate degrees at the AA are validated by the OU. The OU is the awarding body for research degrees at the AA.

Applications will be accepted up to Friday 15 March 2013.
Applications received after this deadline will be accepted at the discretion of the School.