A Practice in Subtraction

A studio piece, in a medium of your choosing, built around one deliberate and defensible omission

Due: 30 April 2027 · Weight: 35%

The brief#

Make one finished piece — writing, image, sound, video, code, a proof, a design, anything with a defined medium — built around a single omission you chose on purpose. Submit the piece and a written defence of at least 300 words: what you left out, why it was harder to cut than to keep, and what the piece would have lost by keeping it.

Submission format#

The piece itself, in whatever format its medium requires, plus the defence as a separate Markdown or PDF file. If the piece is time-based (audio, video, animation), keep it under three minutes: the mark is for the cut, not the runtime.

What this is testing#

Whether the semester’s reading translates into your own practice, not just your ability to describe someone else’s cut after the fact. The defence is marked as strictly as the piece — a strong piece with a weak defence, or a weak piece with a defence that argues its way around the work rather than through it, both mark down.