Production of the tinygrants catalogue is underway! The above image is a detail from the cover (for now, anyway). The book will be 7″ x 7″, 64-pages, and mostly colour, and will include a curatorial essay, interviews with the artists, and details about the project logistics (such as how submissions were solicited and how the projects were selected). Don’t forget — you can get a copy of this catalogue as a thanks for donating $100 or more to the project.

It’s pretty exciting to start putting all of this together, even though it’s also an enormous challenge. How do I start thinking about tinygrants as a project that begins and ends? Last semester I was abuzz with a lot of administrative tasks for tinygrants. This semester, I have to shift gears to think about the social and political implications of a microfunding program for the arts. It’s not that these things weren’t on my mind throughout the submissions and selection processes, but now I have to commit to something!

If you have any ideas for what else should be included in the catalogue, please do let me know! I will be posting updates about how the book is coming together, including a working table of contents once that is a little closer to being set in stone.

The jury is composed of four individuals, all of whom work in or are involved in the arts in some way. They are the first four people who volunteered to be on the jury, and their professional experience is relevant to the task at hand. Their bio information will be available after the grant recipients are announced. The jury members will work independently to ’score’ each application (more on this coming up); there will be no meeting or in-person deliberations. The scores will be tallied, and the strongest projects will emerge at the top, and the top three projects will be funded.

As for the scoring: there are six criteria (that I determined in consultation with others) that will be scored out of ten for each project. They are:

• accordance to tinygrants mission statement,
• creativity/ingenuity/originality,
• reach,
• feasibility,
• clarity of idea, and
• effectiveness of creative intervention.

These criteria are weighted according to what I feel is most important to the tinygrants project. The jury knows that the criteria are weighted, but do not know what the weight scheme is. Once I receive the scoring packages on November 30th, the math will be worked out by a bonafide math whiz (i.e., not me,) and the top projects will be established.

This scoring method is effective should I receive enough donations to be able to fund more projects — I can continue to fund projects as they are ranked without having to reconvene a jury that has already generously donated their time and effort.

I feel that this is a fair–though perhaps unconventional–process. What do you think?

As it stands, the grant recipients will be notified on Monday, December 1, 2009, announcements will follow shortly. If you’d like to hear the news as it’s published, subscribe to email announcements (subscribers will be first to hear!), add tinygrants.ca to your RSS reader, join the Facebook group or follow tinygrants on Twitter. Or, stay tuned to the website, of course.

If your project includes you or others as active producers throughout the project, i.e., a performance event, it may not exceed eight hours. If your project includes installing something in a space and leaving it, the installation may not exceed eight hours, but the piece itself can stay up for however long you’d like.

Why have I put a cap on duration? It is mostly a matter of logistics. As a full-time student who works part-time, I need to be sure that I can attend all of the projects without neglecting my other academic and work responsibilities. I also need to ensure that the projects can be documented (photographs and video) within a reasonable cost, and anything beyond a day is more than I can afford. If you’re unsure as to how this question of duration applies to your project, ask yourself: Can the project in its entirety be documented in one day or less?

Thank you to everyone who has sent me useful comments, suggestions and ideas. If you have something you’d like to say about tinygrants, please email me.

I am trying to unpack this term “creative intervention” in order to articulate the selection criteria for tinygrants. I have been reticent to do this because I worry that by over-defining it, I am unwittingly excluding ideas that would still fit within the tinygrants mandate. However, I do believe it is a necessary step so that the selection process is as fair and transparent as one can be. (By the way — there’s just over a week left to get your applications in. Deadline is November 22nd. Download the application here.)

I think I have broken it down into handful of criteria that describe what kinds of creative interventions tinygrants is looking for. Creative interventions are projects that:

• are visible in non-traditional spaces
• are non-medium-specific
• are (possibly) site specific
• interrupt expectations
• provoke dialogue
• activate a public
• engage audience

Obviously not all projects will embody all of these criteria, but all projects should incorporate some selection of them.

I think it is also important to clarify that only new work should be proposed for tinygrants funding, and the project, from beginning to end, should be funded primarily by tinygrants, which is a maximum of $300. As noted in the FAQ, the grant recipient may supplement their grant with no more than 25% of the tinygrants amount awarded. That means that if you wanted to kick in some of your own cash, you couldn’t kick in more than $75 on a $300 grant.

Can you add anything else to the list of what constitutes a “creative intervention”? There’s a mind map waiting to be updated!

Tinkering with language and terminology has raised several other issues, namely about selection criteria. The application guidelines currently state that selection will be based on accordance to the tinygrants mission statement, creativity and ingenuity, and viability/logistics. I think over the coming weeks I will be including other criteria to more specifically address the common threads that run through the kinds of creative interventions I am looking for, such as activating a public, initiating dialogue (implicitly or explicitly), visibility in non-traditional spaces, education components, inventive use of funds, etc.

With these changes, the overarching principles behind tinygrants remain the same. The coming specifications will only be to name what has already been inferred.

1. Microgrants are for people who aren’t supported by grant-giving councils (either because of eligibility or cost requirements).

2. Students aren’t eligible for funding through grant-giving councils because it is assumed they have institutional advantages provided to them through their schools; non-artists aren’t eligible because it is assumed they don’t have the artistic expertise to deliver works according to established standards of “excellence.”

3. Art schools don’t typically have formal programs for students to develop relational practice; non-artists are sometimes engaged in relational practice.

In short, I think tinygrants will meet the needs of some individuals who aren’t being served by academic institutions and/or funding councils.