Curated by JAEV
10 MB Open Submission
Anyone can submit a drawing. Each is altered and compressed to at most 10 kilobytes. The show closes when it reaches 10 megabytes.
About the work
10 MB Open Submission is an exhibition anyone can take part in. Visitors draw directly in the browser and submit their drawing to the show. They cannot keep it: once submitted, it belongs to the exhibition.
The term open submission describes exhibitions where anyone may submit a work, and a jury decides what is shown. Here, the curatorial gesture is not selection but a set of conditions. JAEV does not choose among the drawings; it decides what happens to all of them. Every drawing is accepted, and every drawing is changed.
On submission, each drawing is altered by one effect drawn at random. Many of the effects take the previous drawing in the show as their material: one drawing may show through another, take on its colours, be pushed aside by its lines, or inherit parts of it. The drawings are then compressed to at most 10,000 bytes each. What survives is an involuntary abstraction, regardless of what was drawn.
The show also has a fixed size, which is part of the same gesture. When the drawings together reach 10,000,000 bytes, it closes for good. Simple drawings take up little space and complex ones more, so no one knows in advance how many it will hold, or which drawing will be the last.
Each drawing is shown with its signature: the time, the approximate place and the device it was made on, the number of strokes, how long it took, and the effect it was given.
The approximate place is looked up from the visitor’s internet address, which is then discarded. IP geolocation by DB-IP, CC BY 4.0.