VKHUTEMAS.academy: RT revives the legacy of the legendary design school

Online workshops were opened on the educational media platform VKHUTEMAS.academy.

On the project website, it will be possible not only to get acquainted with the history of the workshops, but also to take courses on the basics of art and design, created on the basis of original teaching materials, concepts and theoretical developments of teachers and students of VKHUTEMAS.

The materials will be updated and supplemented during the next year. 

VKHUTEMAS was founded shortly after the revolution in 1920 in Moscow and existed for only 10 years. The teachings of his avant-garde teachers were forgotten for decades. At various times, Alexander Rodchenko, Lyubov Popova, Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitsky, Nikolai Ladovsky, Konstantin Melnikov, Vladimir Favorsky and many others taught at the Moscow branch of VKHUTEMAS. VKHUTEMAS produced painters, architects, sculptors, as well as craftsmen for industry - and in fact laid the foundation for design education in Russia. 

Kirill Karnovich-Valois, creative director of RT Creative Lab: “VKHUTEMAS was one of the first in the world to introduce the principles of out-of-the-box thinking long before the term itself appeared.

100 years later, VKHUTEMAS online workshops are reviving the teachings of the legendary creative school in a new shell of digital media. "

One of the main premieres of the project is a series of master classes by Rodchenko.LIVE.

For the first time in history, the founder of Soviet design will read video lectures in the first person.

RT Creative Lab, together with the creative video studio RT, directed by Alexander Scriabin and the development company Phygitalism, specializing in visual solutions in the fields of artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented realities, brought Alexander Rodchenko to life with the help of deepfake.  

Oleg Yusupov, founder of the Phygitalism studio, explained that the uniqueness of this work lies in the fact that a synthetic image in high resolution was created from a small number of photographs: “The original dataset was extremely limited (only a few suitable photos).

To be honest, I don't know if there are any analogues of such an achievement. "

 Earlier, the creative studio RT Creative Lab presented the original font in support of the project - VHUTETYPE. 

The font designer is the famous artist, the legend of poster art Pyotr Bankov, who developed VHUTETAYP together with RT Creative Lab and art director Vsevolod Vlasenko. 

Peter Bankov also created a series of posters in support of the project, which were published on Instagram and Facebook before launching. 

The main platform for online workshops will be the site https://vkhutemas.academy, developed in collaboration with one of the leading Russian web design studios Red Collar.

Users will be able to get acquainted with the works of professors of different directions and students of courses, as well as feel the creative environment of VKHUTEMAS and its time. 

The founder of Red Collar Denis Lomov said that while working on the site, the developers thought about the style of the times of VKHUTEMAS and in developing the design concept were guided by the main principles of the workshops: to look at things from a non-standard angle and use the space as efficiently as possible: “At the level of individual elements, we return to the style of the times of the workshops.

For example, buttons acquire volume on hover - volume as an independent discipline was studied in one of the key workshop courses. "

Each direction in the project has its own curator - an expert on historical heritage in a particular area. Among them are Daria Sorokina (art historian, Bauhaus undergraduate student in Dessau, curator of the "Polygraphy" direction), Alena Sokolnikova (candidate of pedagogical sciences, specialist in design history, curator of the "Color" direction), Polina Streltsova (architecture historian, researcher at the Museum. A.V.Shchuseva, curator of the "Architecture" direction), Alexander Bezin (designer, senior lecturer of the "Academic drawing" department of the Stroganov Moscow State University of Art and Architecture, curator of the "Graphics and Composition" direction).

 The project will collect unique materials stored in personal collections, archives and museums. Among the content partners of the project, the Museum of Architecture named after A.V. Shchusev, the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI) and the State Museum of V.V. Mayakovsky. 

RT Creative Lab is a digital in-house studio for innovative media projects of the RT channel.

Since 2017, the team has implemented a series of large-scale educational projects in the digital environment: # 1917LIVE, # Romanovs100, #Victory Pages, Infinite Writing, Auschwitz Lessons and others.

The projects of the creative studio RT have received more than 250 international and Russian awards, including the Internet Oscars The Webby Awards, Clio Awards, The One Show, D&AD, New York Festivals, Red Dot and many other competitions, as well as nominations for Emmy and Cannes Lions.

In 2020 and 2021, RT Creative Lab entered the top 10 of the world's best in-house agencies according to the American organization The One Club for Creativity.

At the end of 2020, the team took second place in the national rating of AKAR creativity in the Digital segment.