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SUNY Purchase ︎ (DES3240) Design Issues

Topic:
Manifestos


Background

I love my family; but like…in the truest sense of the word. That is to say, I accept their criticism and jokes as being from people who ultimately care. I uses to carry around a big ass spiral bound sketchbook all the time, and one of my cousins used to call it my “manifesto.” I secretly kinda loved it. The point of this story is that the term manifesto has a clear cultural location; a lil freaky, a lil weird, a lil problematic (most contemporary popular iterations, very problematic). The product of someone who is off in some way. However, I think you can also see a definite aspirational “stance” in manifestos. Your next assignment will be creating a “manifesto” of sorts, so trying to set up the path to that assignment.

Required Readings

(Here’s the deal, hopefully it is obvious you don’t have to read all of them for next week; pick one from each category, or three for a single category, and attempt to draw a correlation or contrast. Otherwise, pick a super long one to try and examine it in detail.These are not necessarily “recommended” or “good” but a curated list of polemical ones, societally relevant but problematic ones, ones I’ve never read but would like to hear more about; believe it or not I’ve never read the Communist Manifesto, and ones I’m interested on your thoughts on)

Questions to think about while looking at one or more manifestos

  • Why do dictators and problematic white folks need manifestos?
  • Is the “centralized urgency” of the manifesto still appealing? Necessary? Relevant?
  • Do centralized (aesthetic) ideas help homogonize visual culture? Is that a dangerous direction?

Further reading/viewing


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