ART TO MAKE & DO
Background
Art To Make & Do Will be a collection of templates (or instructions or sets of rules) which can be used to make or to generate multiple artworks. It will be distributed as a book and a website. Both will include some short written pieces about ideas raised by the projects as well as the “instructions” and templates, parts lists, supplier contacts, artists’ information and plenty of visual material.
The request to individuals contributing pieces is that they incorporate some kind of functionality: this is partly to give a benchmark against which participants can authenticate their version of a project and compare the degree of variation it incorporates. It is also to allow the works to develop beyond mere quantitive dispersal and to be not only re-made by the participants/audience, but be constantly remade through use.
There will be space for random or subjective variation - in effect setting up an evolutionary algorithm that lets the design develop very slowly over “generations”. Each example of a particular work will be an instance of its type but not a replica, offering a whole range of issues for consideration. The resulting pieces can eventually be catalogued and mapped, brought together, perhaps, categorised and generally worked with as a kind of natural resource – a population of objects available for study and examination.
*here I've tried to “map out” some of the ideas involved in a graphic form which might help to show just how the project could develop and what it involves.

The Programme
I'm currently looking for artists, designers and writers who might like to be involved in the project in some capacity. In the next few weeks I will be preparing some funding applications, and also a more comprehensive “information pack” which will offer some examples of the kind of templates and instructions and works which started off my interest in the project, and some of the reference material I have been looking at. This is meant to be a starting-off point only – one of the key ideas for this work is that it involves a genuinely collective dynamic and that all the participants, at every point bring in new ideas which can shift the direction and flavour.
Part of the funding bid will go toward commissioning three short written pieces which will deal with the ideas which inform the project and the issues it might raise – what these finally look at will depend very much on the writers. These will probably be included in the book and on the website, but are also there to help the first stages in which pieces will be devised and the graphic and discursive style of the “instructions” developed.