Hi again! Remember us from last March / A HUNDRED YEARS AGO?
We’re on for 2021 and a week away from the third installment of March Ensemble. Here’s our elevator pitch: “Challenge: Create and publish a piece of art every day for a month and shake off that winter sludge”. During our first two years, the 31-day March Ensemble challenge has produced well over 200 individual pieces of art.
In addition to the ever-evolving core collective, we’ve included folks we call the “Extended Ensemble” — creators that don’t take part in the marathon but whose art gets highlighted during one designated day in March. March Ensemble is still new and scrappy, and it’s been fun finding different ways to put on this little shindig. This year we’ve decided to make more room for the Extended Ensemble and have switched up our overall format to facilitate the shift.
We’re going back to the root of our mission while simultaneously kicking our own asses even harder. Our goal has always been to create without overthinking and allow room for experimentation, so this year we’re taking a page from one of our favorite methods of sparking creativity.
Let’s talk about Brian Eno and his “Oblique Strategies”.
In short, Oblique Strategies is a collection of prompts that are designed to stir your brain, inspire the uninspired, and promote lateral thinking. Each prompt is different. Some “strategies” consist of specific suggestions, others are more abstract and ambiguous. Examples include:
“Don’t be frightened of clichés.”
“Give the game away.”
“Cascades.”
(Learn more about Oblique Strategies by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt here and here)
Every day for 31 days, our artists will receive a creative prompt at 00:00 Eastern European Time. They can use the prompt however they want — as a guiding light, a jumping-off point, just some peripheral inspiration, anything. This is where the Extended Ensemble gets included in the process more tangibly than ever: Each member will be allocated a day in March and they will receive the same prompts that the core Ensemble will be using that day.
If you’d like to take part in our weird little journey, learn more about the challenge or join us for the ride in any other way, please follow us on Instagram. You can message us through this form or by directly emailing us at marchensemble2021@gmail.com. The days for visiting artists are filling up, so please reach out soon!
All artists and forms of art are welcome and you don’t need to be a professional artist or even contribute whatever art you usually like to create to join us. We’re more about the ethos than the outfit.
See you in March! xx