Knowledge Exchange

This year at the School of Media and Communication students, academics and industry came together to form a new collective as a knowledge exchange using the philosophy of the Anti-fragile.

The term Anti-fragile comes from the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’. The Anti-fragile is beyond resilience, it uses chaos and the unknown as a catalyst for growth and transformation.

The Anti-fragile Collective began in January 2020 as a Knowledge Exchange initiative with Year 1 students in the School of Media and Communication and culminated as a takeover event with creative agency SUPERIMPOSE. As part of this event students, academics and industry used the ethos of the anti-fragile to co-create ‘The Anti-fragile Collective Manifesto’ and collectively ‘takeover’ the entire Lime Grove campus.

The campus was transformed into a platform for creative activations including: a projectionmapped immersive installation that highlighted vulnerability as a catharsis for transformation, to an architected ‘experience’ that incites feelings of ‘emergence’ through visual cues and bespoke sound pieces, notably familiar to the darker side of human vulnerabilities.

The presentation closed with an immersive ‘ritual’ encouraging self-control, reflection and acceptance.

The next series of Anti-fragile Collective initiatives took place online in the spring of 2020, directly responding to the introduction of lockdown and the new physically distanced reality staff and students found themselves in.

A series of online Anti-fragile workshops were developed by innovators from the across the media, communication and performance industries including: PITCH STUDIOS™, DVTK, Alexander Whitley, Donatella Barbieri and Seetal Solanki, The Founder and Director of Ma-tt-er. This collective exchange between staff, students and industry enabled the design and development of new rituals that explored the creative capacities of the body in isolation.

Students and staff addressed issues related to the body in isolation and in response, prototyped new rituals integrating a range of insights that emerged from this collective ambition: rewilding with nature, conscious and intentional use of our digital devices, discovering a more playful attitude towards our creativity and ourselves and returning to the breath as our most productive bodily activity. The Anti-fragile Collective has grown from a student facing project to becoming a community of students, alumni, staff, researchers and industry to question, learn and develop possible alternative futures, embodying and fashioning the philosophy of anti-fragility as we do.

In July 2020 industry, academics and alumni from the School of Media and Communication will converge in an online event that will identify the spirit, mood or zeitgeist of the fashion communication, media and performance sector. From this workshop we will define our next theme that will inform the direction of our external engagement for the coming academic year and in turn, offer a framework for further curriculum development within the school.

Daniel Caulfield-Sriklad, Knowledge Exchange Lead, School of Media and Communication