A manifesto is a public declaration of principles, intentions, motives or views. It is written by an individual or a group to reflect their views. A manifesto can express an opinion on a particular issue, a whole worldview or set of principles. Artists often perform these principles through acts of making as well as through their pronouncements. The purpose of the unit is to introduce you to the manifesto as a form of artistic declaration. It asks you to consider the value of art within society and then provides you with a suite of skills that enable you to express principles, intentions, motives or views through written pronouncement as well as creative acts. In doing this the unit places value on your contribution to the course as well as the wider field of artistic discourse by asking you to situate your work within key historical and contemporary forms of artistic manifesto. You will learn the core skills of close reading and summarising and the relationship of image to text within creative practice. This unit introduces students to the creative arts emphasis on praxis, where theory is tested and embodied in making and writing.

Set projects will engage you in collaborative and cross-media practice as well as concentrated individual focus. Practical demonstrations and making/writing workshops will introduce you to a range of the facilities available on campus and initiate an explorative, critical and reflective approach to practice. The unit will also emphasise temporality as a formal aspect to consider when making art. This means exploring how time is used across a wide variety of modes of production, from static to moving images and from monumental to ephemeral art. This will be a broad introduction to this fundamental formal consideration.