• Preface: What it is and how we did it
• Introduction
• Open Engagement: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse.
• A Tracing, Socially
• Draft of a manifesto written in defense of a group of people that did not ask for my defense, using words they would not use and engaging people they ignore
• This is the End: Death and other Sensory Thresholds
• On the Discourse of Ethics in Socially Engaged Art Practice
• Are You Lonely? Make Art For Your Friends
• Interaction! Participation! Engagement! Production
• On Collaborating Within the M.O.S.T. (2003-2008)
• The Politics of Friendship, Or, Who Your Friends Should Be. An Interview with Matthew David Rana and Rick Butler
• On Multi-Tasking
• Making Things Better
• Me, Her and Us: Mapping Displacement with Anna Martine and Mary Anne Brooks at Open Engagement
• You Need To Have That Feeling That Anything's Possible
• Social Practice Art and Tech-Nihilism
• The Persistent Complicity of Heterogeneity
• Squirming
• Don't Just Invite Me To Dinner
• Open Engagement: A Toast to Access and Inclusion
• Thoughts On Social Practice Art
• Before, During, and After
• What is Public Art and Who is Your Public?
• From Every Angle
• What I remember about the video of John Paul II Marina Abramovic showed @ Reed in 2006
• What is there to dance about?
• Global Yawning Manifesto
• Interview: Musician, Movement Artist, Designer
• Clothing Musicians
• No Art But Class War
• Mirror Neurons to the Mona Lisa
• Fragments and Tangents
• Before
• Texts: What we are thinking about when we're thinking about Open Engagement
• After
• Contributors
• Appendix: The Back Channel
• Bibliography

Global Yawning Manifesto - The personal is planetary

Jay Critchley

A new day is yawning!

Throw off the shackles of cultural oppression, release the tension and weariness from within, open up to the possibilities of group experiences and community.

GLOBAL YAWNING for a small planet is a multi-media performance project about the environment, utilizing the underappreciated significance of yawning as a metaphor for the power of the individual and the community to make change.

This project responds to an exhausted, ailing planet with humor and provocation. A new day is yawning! It spoofs the meteoric ascendancy of global warming as a cultural and political litmus test while calling attention to the bottom line of this eco-collapse – human beings. The personal is planetary! Having developed skills as an accomplished yawner over the years, as well as a performance artist and provocateur, I will bring this natural, yet culturally-shunned, practice into the light of day.

The Be-Ins of the 1960a and 1970s were the beginning of the awakening of massive cultural mixing, interaction and dematerialization. A GLOBAL YAWN-IN follows in that tradition in that it is post-cyber sexual, post-snail mail, post-greenwashing, post-toxic deviance, post-therapy, post-carbon-sequestering, post-shoes of rectitude, post-insurgent creationists, post-consumer, post-auto-friendly cheats, post-OMGs, post-Visa vipers.

It’s time for social gestures that bring results - a new interaction: Yawning Yoga, Affordable Yawning, a Yawning Club (based on successful Laughing Clubs) and Yawning Workouts.

It’s been shown that yawning increases alertness, reduces stress and enhances personal, community and planetary health. We yawn to cool the brain; we act to cool the Earth. It’s mysterious, without a definitive explanation. Is it a herd instinct, synchronizing mood behavior among gregarious animals? Adelie Penguins employ yawning in their courtship rituals. It feels good, often embarrassing. It is an essential, human, cross-cultural activity that can be liberating, re-energizing.