Today the 1st year MFA students got on their soapboxes, and wrote, designed, and distributed some feisty design manifestos. They demanded equal rights for Arabic men in design, advocated for the use of materials by graphic design students, and campaigned for Foundation students’ heightened awareness of the world outside the VCUQ doors. Go find them quickly, before the cleaners get to them: in the 2nd floor men’s washroom, the 1st floor graphic design area, and the Ground floor Foundation area near the exit.
We read some manifestos by Marinetti and Fluxus, among others, and the students extracted the following qualities or, what we called the, ELEMENTS OF A MANIFESTO:
- Principles (beliefs)
- Instinctual/gut-felt/immediate/urgent
- Compact in shape/pithy/to-the-point
- Based on personal experiences
- Sticking-outness/rude in tone/in your face
- Independent of influences and yet interdependent with other manifestos
- Aimed towards the future/utopian/want to change things
- Selfishness/ego
- Propaganda/sensational
- Rich and evocative imagery
- Gather groups/’We, the undersigned’
- Declarative, direct, and sincere (no irony)
- Fine line between artist’s statement and manifesto
- Poster-like (Paolo told us how in Italian the word ‘manifesto’ means ‘poster’
PROVOCATION # 4: You guessed it. Make your own design-related manifesto about any subject, issue, idea or cause you like, as long as you feel strongly about it. Consider, too, the medium you would use to disseminate your manifesto. How would your intended public encounter it? Post it here or post a photo of it in situ.
Some background reading:
100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, selected by Alex Danchev, Penguin Modern Classics, 2011
Color Fundamentalist
We live in a world that is blindingly over complicated. Everywhere we look, color assaults us. Millions and millions of colors all penetrate our corneas every second. It is time for the madness to stop and replaced with the truth – the color red.
Think of all the colors that aren’t red. They make a mockery of what lies between 620 and 740 nanometers on the electromagnetic spectrum. What insanity is grass, non-red flowers, or the sky? How can we say this is natural? The fish of the sea are mostly not red. The birds of the sky, with the exception of a few parrots and the male cardinals, are a blight on the face of what could be.
We must muster our forces and cover all offenders in pure crimson. For those things that cannot be painted, we must use dye or some sort of magic marker to right what is wrong. After we blot out all other offending colors, we must look inward to correct what leans orange or purple.
For far too long have we suffered the senseless onslaught of color. The world is ready for a change.
Without Red – we’re dead…
A Insistent Plea for Analog-Digital Reciprocity…
Our sentience is inherently interlinked to our somatic selves.
Cerebral conception is senseless (without sensory engagement) without a physical manifestation.
Thus, today, is becomes imperative that the ideas we develop, things we make, environments we form – regardless of the means of conception or fabrication – acknowledge the intrinsic multi-sensorial properties and qualities of the things we conceive, form, and experience. The things we design and engage with all have a texture, weight, temperature, smell, taste, sound, along with a (visual) form (gestalt) and color.
We need to recognize the synesthetic empathy that exists between a design’s various sensorial stratums. We need to experience them, feel them, become (proprioceptively) aware of them, and design them accordingly.
The tools affiliated with the digital means of germinating and forming ideas retain smoldering layers of creative potential, but also posses the seeds for dogma.
We need to recognize that all we design – ideas, artifacts, spaces, settings – will inevitably have a physical presence – the voice of a poet, the talisman of a preacher, the bicycle, the phone booth, the garden…
We need to appreciate and celebrate the richness of all our faculties…