Punch card is a paid open call mail art project for Middlesbrough Art Week: Measure, 2023. 

Middlesbrough Art Week: Measure, 2023 engages with ways of thinking of past, present and future: from deep time to waiting time to no time. Work selected this year focuses on work that asks us to notice the centrality of time and how we perceive, mark, measure and value it.

A recent report, Structurally F*cked highlights the shocking low rates of pay for artists. This mail art project seeks to put that right (after a fashion). 2023 report Structurally F*ucked by a-n magazine reports artists paid £2.60 per hour on average, well below the minimum wage. This open call asks people to provide a postcard that has taken the legally obligated amount of pay per hour to make.

In order to address this disparity between UK government sanctioned work rates and the reported payments artists receive, the only way to square the circle between £2.60 per hour, and the minimum wage is £10.42 per hour,  is to ask you to make art quicker. In order to fit both of these conditions then you have under 15 minutes to think about and make a work using an A5 postcard (both sides).

How to apply:

In the first instance, please email with ‘punchcard’ in the subject line to: projectmanager@theauxiliary.co.uk by August 13th 2023 with either a postal address for us to supply you an A5 postcard or stating that you will supply your own (we will compensate you for a 2nd class stamp).

As we have a set budget for the project, if more than 50 people apply by August 10th, a random draw will take place. Everyone selected will be notified on the 14th August with postcards sent out on the same day. We will send you a pre-stamped postcard in an envelope. 

You may spend a maximum of 14.9 minutes thinking about and executing an artwork on said postcard. You should mail the postcard to us (we regretfully cannot pay for the time it takes for individuals to go to a post box) and email an invoice for £2.60. The deadline for entry is August 31th (postmarked return).

Exhibition dates: September 28th to Oct 7th 2023. Each of the 50 submissions is exhibited at one of the MAW 2023 venues (both sides of the postcards).

We will then return each postcard post-exhibition and pay invoices electronically.

How we work out the time/rate:

We worked out that we will pay £2.60 to make each postcard. If you are over 23 years of age from April, you are entitled to get  £10.42 per hour. So you can only work on the postcard for a percentage of an hour that relates to the discrepancy (of £10.42 minus £2.60).  Pay per minute should be  0.173666666666667 pence per minute, so you can work on it for just under 15 minutes (14.971209213051795 minutes).

We regret that we cannot pay you to also read this information. Universal Basic Income (UBI) would make this possible. In England, two micro pilot schemes are taking place: one in central Jarrow, in north-east England, and one in East Finchley, in north London. For further info about UBI: autonomy.work/portfolio/basic-income-big-local