Jan van Toorn and Els Kuipers were invited to run a workshop ‘Staging the message – strategy, method and language use’ during the week of 23-27th Nov 2015 at London College of Communication.
This practical workshop offers participants theoretical and practical tools for an editorial approach to visual production. It concentrates on the critical ‘journalistic’ tradition in media that works in the tension between realistic imitation and self-conscious artifice, i.e. between representation and presentation. In reaction to the virtual realism of the spectacle dominating mainstream media, the workshop deals with textual, visual and other practices that further more complex and argumentative forms of communication, and foregrounds the constructed nature of messages in order to solicit the active interpretation of the viewer/reader.
Jan also gave a lecture “On strategy, method and language use in visual communication” open to the public.
Els Kuijpers and Jan van Toorn currently work together in editorial projects of visual communication that focus on the dialogic character of the message. They recently published the experimental publication And/or extended: on contradiction of the work of Jan van Toorn (nai010 publishers Rotterdam 2013) as the result of close collaboration between the author and the designer: the complex text with its many excursuses and digressions resembles Van Toorn’s visual project; the layered structure of the design follows Kuijpers’ literary undertaking. In order to bridge theory and practice of design [in thinking and making] they together conduct seminars and workshops on communicative design addressing the staging of messages by investigating media, strategies, method and language use of communication.
See here for the student experience of the workshop