IPE 2009 Call For Work - Current Thoughts
The responses from you all have been the cause of some serious head scratching amongst the IPE Team so I thought it a good time to give you an idea of our current thoughts.
The first is that we should bring forward the Call For Work from our provisional target date of early June in order not to lose momentum while at the same time giving you all more time to complete your editions: especially those who first have to make your own paper.
The likely date will now be around early May which is not so long to wait. Don’t worry that you will miss out by not staying glued to this blog. All those who have registered interest already will get a personal email notification in addition to us posting the Call far and wide. The submission date will remain around early September - giving you a clear four months.
We have also been considering a few of the ground rules:
[In no particular order]
The edition size will certainly be ten. One print will be retained in a print archive - albeit we have not yet decided who to bestow this to yet. A second print will be available for exhibition and sale with proceeds contributing to the administration costs. This leaves eight prints to be returned to each participant. The current questionnaire view is overwhelmingly that these should be a mixed bag. The issue of sale price is problematic and may be the subject of a further questionnaire. In the meantime, if you have strong views then please make them known either by email or by posting on the Green Door Forum IPE thread.
We want to keep administration costs as low as possible and are currently considering £5 (five pounds GB). One way that we can do this is to pass all the postage costs on to the contributors using PayPal as the payment medium. It could work like this: you send your prints to Green Door at your cost. We sort,catalogue and redistribute the exchange prints for return. We will then email each participant to announce that the return prints are available with details of the return postage costs from the UK based on current Royal Mail rates - all charges transparent and verifiable. We then raise the appropriate postage costs as a PayPal invoice. You settle the invoice and we post the prints to you. This procedure also overcomes many of the issues about the unfairness of blanket administration charges that do not take into account the varying included postage costs as well as the vexed problems associated with currency exchange rates - PayPal takes care of all of that.
Ther questionnaire responses to print size have certainly raised some IPE Team eyebrows. From the comments made at the time of registering interest we got the impression that you were tiring of yet another mini-print exchange. Well, it would seem not! The current questionnaire responses would suggest a desire for a 12 cm x 12 cm (approx 5 inch x 5 inch) paper size. If that is the case then, in order to facilitate potiential mounting and framing of the prints, we would probably stipulate a maximum image size of 10 cm x 10 cm (approx 4 inch x 4 inch) - now that is small by any standards and will present its own very unique challenges especially for those of you used to working on large images.
We are also most concerned that as the first UK-based open international exchange that the artistic and technical standards of the submissions should be high. There are indications from the questionnaire responses that many would be in favour of us mediating to ensure this standard by rejecting some prints. This we have not yet decided to do but we will likely outline in the Call For Work our underlying ethos that the work submitted should be of the highest quality that you can acheive and should be work created especially for the exchange: we would certainly frown on leftover Christmas card designs for example.
That should be enough for now. The pace is hotting up guys and the Call For Work is almost upon us.
Peace
Dave
