WWILMA, graphics and installation manual
This page concerns my work WWilma, that was generatively built by its audience at the Centre of Contemporary Art in Torun (COCA), Poland, in 2010-11. Full details of its final form can be found here, but on this page I detail its origin in a sketch concept, and the later development and making sure it could be properly executed. The project began with sketch concept, a contribution to the book Curatorial Cooking, a collection of works to celebrate the closure of the Dutch exhibition and maker-space Platform 21, where I had previously contributed to the Repair Manifesto.
This sketch concept was intended to stand on its own, but to my surprise, the editor of the book, Joanna van der Zanden, later invited me to produce the work for real, for the show Tag! Base! Hide & Seek at COCA. This first required figuring out how it would work and with what materials. I built a prototype ‘proof of concept’ in a friend’s Berlin basement and made an animation to show how the installation would develop over time at COCA space.
What I figured out from this work informed an instruction manual sent to Poland, as I couldn’t attend personally, and in any case it wasn’t necessary being a generative artwork. As shown in this image from the cover, the concept developed, from the simplistic ‘boy-girl’ idea of the sketch, to include gender preferences indicated by colored tape, so I made a mock image to show how this would look. The manual includes images such as this, to roughly indicate how the installation and its instructions for assembly, in the form of posters, should be set up. As can be seen from the final installation, the COCA team did a great job implementing these instructions. The only problem, I heard, was that the structure generated too well, in that some of the other artists in the group show complained that my work was growing too large and expanding into their own spaces over the 2 months or so the work was exhibited.
