Weather
Set it up; let the material make the marks.
Paper left out in the rain.
Seen in Dieter Roth, Staple Cheese (A Race), Eugenia Butler Gallery, Los Angeles, 1970
Try it on your work
Put a mark-making material on a surface where a process will act on them: rain, sun, a radiator, a damp corner. Write down the collection time now. Do not touch it. Collect at that time and work only with what the process left.
Write a paragraph on paper and leave it where something will act on it, for a time you fix before you leave it: a windowsill, a coat pocket, the bottom of a bag. Collect on time and transcribe what is still legible; the gaps stay gaps.
A group sets up one shared surface and agrees the harvest time before anyone leaves. Nobody returns until then. At the harvest each person names one thing the process did that none of them would have done.
How it has been used
Set it up, then let a material process make the marks: paper left out in the rain, a steel plate left to rust, ink dropped on wet paper. The move forbids the hand: between set-up and harvest nobody touches the work, and the harvest comes at the time fixed at the start, whatever it looks like.
Where it leads
Grouped under Move the decision or responsibility