The Ignite Manifesto
The calls are multiplying. But so is artist precarity.
Ignite begins in a paradox. A widening field of social, cultural, ecological and civic concern appears to be producing an abundance of foundations, grants, residencies, commissions and collaborations. Social media makes this landscape vividly visible: every day brings another opportunity, another possible destination, another deadline.
Yet beneath this abundance, artist precarity is deepening. Community-centred, bottom-up and artist-led practice is being asked to survive on less, even as money and attention concentrate at the highest end of the art market, where corporate capital, dominant galleries and a narrow band of work increasingly treat art as a speculative asset. The landscape looks rich with possibility while the people making the work face ever more fragile conditions in which to make it.
Art begins in a place, a culture, a community and a life actually lived. This local grounding matters, but artistic practice does not stop at a border. Ideas, methods and questions travel, and the opportunities surrounding them have become global too.
For the artist, this global landscape arrives as a blizzard of calls, requirements, locations and, most relentlessly, timelines. The fear of overlooking the right opportunity follows the artist back into the studio.
An opportunity system that consumes the attention artists need for their work contains a contradiction at its heart. Too much time is spent finding, interpreting, chasing and applying for opportunities; too little remains for the sustained concentration from which art emerges.
We ask technology to carry the burden
At Kata, we believe technology should complement human ability, not compete with it. AI should carry repetitive labour where human effort is being wasted, leaving people free for the more human work their time and attention deserve.
For art, that boundary is fundamental. Search, comparison, pattern recognition, sensemaking and administration are where machines can carry real weight. Ignite is built within that boundary: not to make the work, but to make the world around it more navigable.
Creation, imagination, taste, judgment, relationships and artistic direction belong to the artist.
Match the work, not the keywords
Most matching compares what an artist says about their practice with what an institution says it wants. Ignite begins beneath those descriptions, with the body of work and materials an artist chooses to share: portfolios, projects, statements, proposals and collaborations. From them, it develops a living understanding of the artist's professional signature — the concerns, methods, capabilities, contexts and directions recurring across the practice.
It brings the same attention to institutions, looking beyond a single call towards funding histories, previous programmes, artists and projects supported, partnerships formed and priorities acted upon. This is not an attempt to uncover hidden intentions or predict who will be chosen. It is a way of seeing deeper relationships between what an artist has actually made and what an institution has actually enabled.
Matching should not be a collision of keywords. It should be a meeting of practices, histories and possibilities, evolving as they do.
Opportunity is a relationship
The right opportunity does not always belong to one artist alone. A project may need another discipline, a complementary capability, a different perspective or a genuine relationship with a place or community.
Ignite therefore searches for collaborators as well as calls, connecting artists through meaningful relationships between their work, methods, interests and direction — not through popularity, proximity or whoever is already in the room. From these connections, a living network can grow, turning fragmented knowledge and individual capacity into a collective ability to pursue work.
Ignite carries that possibility towards action: helping the artist understand why an opportunity may fit, who might help bring it to life and how the idea can become an application or proposal ready to send. The artist remains the author and decision-maker throughout.
The time belongs to the work
We cannot remove uncertainty from an artist's life, nor should any machine decide what deserves to be made. But we can refuse to accept that navigating the machinery of opportunity must consume the time, attention and emotional capacity on which artistic practice depends.
Ignite exists to return some of that capacity: less time searching, decoding institutions, watching deadlines and carrying the anxiety of what might be missed; more time making art, forming consequential collaborations and moving a practice forward.
Find and land the next gig that moves your practice forward.