• 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

What it is and how we did it

OPEN is a collaborative, co-written book, a real-time, writing-in-public experiment that was written by more than two dozen contributors (some anonymous) during the 2010 Open Engagement Conference: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse. in Portland, Oregon, co-sponsored by Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA concentration, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Portland Community College.

We set out to address the concerns, practices, and issues around socially engaged art, but equally important was the idea of a performative, inclusive thinking-in-public that this project represents. We threw the door to participation wide open, taking all comers.

We wrote for four days at all hours of the day and night in a single online document from May 14 through 18, with two drop-in sessions at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's (PICA's) Resource Room where we had WiFi and a number of computers available. On PiratePad.net we were able to chat with each other in a sidebar while we wrote and edited and responded to one another's salvos in the main editing window. (This chat is documented in the chapter entitled The Back Channel.) Friends checked in from all over the country (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles), and we met new contributors from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Stockholm, Sweden and Limerick, Ireland.

We invited contributions of statements by conference presenters and participants, responses to questions posed in the initial conference prospectus, responses to existing texts, conversations, essays, interviews, statements, project reports, and a bibliography of related documents and books for further reading

The result is OPEN. Some contributions are anonymous. Some contributions stretch the premise to the breaking point and beyond. There are manifestos, queries, interviews, critiques, essays, and even a poem. Some represent conversations-in-writing in which writers responded in real time to one another. While we were writing, the contributions were color-coded by participant so we could see, more or less, who was writing what. I've used separations between texts to indicated some of the back and forth, but as for intrasentence editing, you'll just have to use your imagination. Every contribution is included here. I have merely moved work around to give OPEN a bit of structure.

So a big thank you to all of the contributors. Thank you to Liam Drain for helping me think things through and for being stalwart. Thank you Patrick Leonard and everyone at PICA for hosting this project and to Matthew Stadler and Publication Studio for offering to publish it. Thank you to the Open Engagement organizers for welcoming the project into the conference.

And finally, I owe a big thank you to Gabriel Widing who recommended PiratePad.net when our first choice of online platform couldn't support all of us logging in at once. OPEN first existed here:

http://piratepad.net/b51CXFYiZD and  http://piratepad.net/erdnyzkeMu

Lisa Radon