Experimental Communication (playfully renamed X.com in its current virtual life), engages students in a critical (re)mapping of the relations between culture and technology, ethics and aesthetics, the personal and political, across an ever-mutating present. X.com practitioners ask what it means to deprogramme the temporality of the archive by allowing speculative, marginal and untold perspectives to emerge.

Our approach is shaped by the belief that visual communication can be thought of as a field in which radically different materialities coexist, such as human behaviour and computational processes. This year students faced these issues and questions head on, which have become more poignant amidst the global pandemic. Through a discipline and media mash-up, characteristic of Experimental Communication practitioners, this year’s cohort brings together an audiovisual feast composed of installations, performances, film essays, writing, publishing, radio broadcasts, and the creation and curation of situations that hit back at hierarchical, ordered and individualistic ways of living. The result is works that clearly and confidently move from set critical positions to expanded views of what visual communication is, reframing what we do, why we do it and how it impacts and affects the world or even creates new worlds. X the Unknown.