← Provenance records · OPUSCRIPT
The Craft Provenance Standard
An opus is a work. A script is the account written of it. OPUSCRIPT is the record a maker keeps of how one object came to exist — the materials and where they came from, the decisions taken and the ones refused, the hours at the bench, and what went wrong — signed by the person whose hands did the work. It exists because a buyer can no longer tell made from generated by looking, and because the word “handmade” now costs nothing to say.
OPUSCRIPT makes accurate records of things that cannot otherwise be verified. This is one of two: the record of how a handmade object came to exist. The other is the record of what machines say about a business.
OPUSCRIPT defines what it takes to claim, credibly, that a person made a thing — and gives that claim a shape a buyer, a gallery, an insurer, or a court can actually inspect.
There is four centuries of precedent for this. Assay offices struck marks into silver recording who made a piece, what it was made of, where it was tested and when, for one reason: a buyer standing in a shop could not tell silver from plate by looking. The problem returns whenever the eye stops being a reliable instrument, and the answer has always been the same — put the claim in writing, in a fixed form, attached to the object.
The claim "handmade" currently carries no required evidence. It is asserted on product pages, in listings, and on labels, by people who made the object with their hands and by people who did not, in identical words. As generated images, generated text, and generated objects become cheap and convincing, the assertion loses the only thing that made it worth anything: the ability to distinguish.
The response is not detection. Detection asks a machine to judge an artefact after the fact, and it fails — reliably, and in both directions. The response is documentation: a record produced during making, by the person making, of things only that person could know.
A record of materials with named suppliers, of decisions with the alternatives that were rejected, of hours across dated sessions, of a stage photographed half-finished — this is not proof in the mathematical sense, and this standard does not claim it is. It is evidence of the kind that has always underwritten provenance: specific, checkable, and expensive to fake convincingly for an object nobody actually made.
| Term | Meaning within this standard |
|---|---|
| Artefact | A single physical object, or a numbered instance within a stated edition, offered or held as the work of a named maker. |
| Maker | The identified person who performed the shaping work. A studio may hold the record; a person must sign it. |
| Provenance record | The document produced under this standard for one artefact. Also called a dossier. |
| Human authorship | The shaping decisions and the physical execution were performed by the named maker. It does not mean no tool, machine, or software was involved — see § 6. |
| Contemporaneous | Recorded during making or within seven days of completion. A record assembled from memory years later may still be honest, but it is not contemporaneous and must say so. |
| Conformance | A record meets a tier when it contains every element that tier requires. Tiers are self-assessed and self-declared. Nobody audits them — see § 8. |
Four questions, in the order a sceptic asks them: whose hands, what material, what happened at the bench, and over what time. Each class is a plain thing rather than a technical one, because a record only works if the person reading it can tell at a glance what is being claimed.
Whose hands did the work, under what practice, and what they are willing to put their name to.
What it is made of, and where each material actually came from.
What happened at the bench: stages, tools, the decisions taken with the ones refused, and what went wrong.
When, over how long, and across how many separate sittings.
Class III is the class that carries the weight, and specifically the parts of it that a seller would rather leave out. Anyone can list materials. Almost nobody fabricating a record will invent the moment the spine cracked and had to be rebacked, or the reason a rejected cloth was rejected, because those details are only available to somebody who was there and they make the object sound less perfect.
A record with no faults recorded is not a record of making. It is a description of a finished thing. If nothing went wrong, say that explicitly and say why — an unusually clean run is itself information.
Tiers escalate by evidence, not by quality of workmanship. A masterpiece with a thin record is Recorded. A modest piece with a full record is Attested. This is deliberate: the standard measures documentation, and claims nothing about merit.
The minimum honest record. Establishes who, what of, and when.
Adds the evidence of working. This is the tier most commissions should reach.
Adds visual evidence and a second party. Appropriate for significant, insured, or resold work.
Reproduce this wording exactly. A record claiming conformance with altered declaration wording does not conform. The value of a standard phrase is that it means one thing everywhere it appears.
I made this artefact. The shaping decisions recorded here were mine, the physical work was performed by my hands, and the account of materials, process, decisions, and time given in this record is true to the best of my knowledge. Where tools, machines, or software assisted the work, I have named them. Where I have relied on memory rather than notes taken at the bench, I have said so.
This standard is not a purity test. A bookbinder uses a board chopper. A silversmith uses a rolling mill. A maker who refuses every machine is not more human than one who uses them, and a standard that pretended otherwise would be adopted by nobody and believed by no one.
The distinction OPUSCRIPT draws is between tools that execute and systems that decide.
A maker who used a generative tool for a decorative motif and says so, with the prompt and the system named, has a conforming record. A maker who used one and did not say so has a void record, and the omission is worth more to a sceptic than the artefact is worth to a buyer.
This is the point on which the whole standard rests. Its credibility comes entirely from makers disclosing things they were not obliged to disclose. A standard used to launder claims is worth less than no standard at all — it supplies the vocabulary of trust to the people least entitled to it.
On a listing, label, invoice, or certificate, state the tier and the version:
OPUSCRIPT v1.0 — Documented
The claim must be accompanied by the record itself, or a working reference to where the record can be read. A tier claimed without a retrievable record is an assertion, which is the exact thing this standard exists to replace.
Records may be delivered as a printed and bound dossier, a PDF, a page on the maker's own site, or a file supplied with the object. Format is not specified. Retrievability is.
Stated plainly, because a standard that oversells itself gets adopted quickly and abandoned faster.
What it does do: it makes the honest maker's claim inspectable, and it makes the dishonest one commit specifics in writing. That is a smaller promise than the market would like and it is the one that can actually be kept.
OPUSCRIPT is published for open use. Any maker, studio, guild, gallery, marketplace, or platform may adopt it, cite it, require it, or build tooling for it, without permission, fee, or notification.
The wording of the declaration in § 5 and the tier definitions in § 4 must not be altered while the OPUSCRIPT name is used. Fork it under another name if you need different terms — a standard whose meaning varies by user is not a standard.
Suggested licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Confirm your preferred terms before publication.
The OPUSCRIPT name and marks are owned by CIONAOD Inc. The standard is free to use; the name identifies who publishes and maintains it.