• 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

Provisional Title

Here we are at the half-way point of this collaborative writing experiment. It is Sunday, and there is a lot of good writing here, and a lot of unfinished thoughts, many of them my own.

As I was walking to PICA Friday morning for our first live session and the kick off of the project, it occurred to me that I hate thinking in public. I'm the kind of guy who likes to walk away, mull it over, even sleep on it, and get back to you. And what was OPEN but a thinking-in-public? From the first time I tried to type the word "occurred" which I typically have trouble spelling (and with that as a microcosm for my usual stumbling toward good thoughts process), I realized how challenging this would be. Whose idea was this anyway? As one types on, with friends and anonymous strangers checking in and out, one loses the performance anxiety, realizing that if this is going to get done, it's just got to get done.

Now, though, a new question arises, not about process but about product. Having initiated the project, I feel a responsibility to and for its outcome. And here is where it gets interesting and where the parallels between this project and participatory art works are most vivid. There are several ways to look at it. One, the process is the product. It's the experience of writing with others (and chatting in the sidebar with other writers) that is OPEN. This lets me and all of us off the hook for quality of product because, "You had to be there," a stance that serves as a fortress to repel critical analysis of the product. Tricky. I'd begun the project with a number of snippets of writing in my pocket and/or floating around in my head. One was Mads Lynnerup's "You're the artist. You figure it out." I wondered if this didn't have a corollary in "You're the critic. You figure it out," which really means as Lynnerup's phrase, an abdication of responsibility. Dead authors tell no tales.

But the first critic is the artist herself, and if the artist frames the work such that it resists criticism ("Keep moving, nothing to see here"), how is the artist herself to make decisions about a project in process or in retrospect? How is she to evaluate if it worked well enough that she should continue on that line of inquiry? Is the experience of the participants the only place to look to be able to evaluate the project?

Even if we are to say process is product, OPEN is still open to critical analysis of the intention and framing of the project. And with many socially engaged art works, this is where the point of evaluation lies as well.

But at the end of the day, unlike many experiential artworks, OPEN is product as well as process. All of us collaborating on OPEN have a responsibility not only to the process (which has been going swimmingly I might add), but to the product. So it is that I find myself thinking about the threads I've thus far left unfinished (and my responsibility to finish them), about the structure of this thing or as of now, its non-structure. And finally, I'm considering the ethics of the project, my responsibility to the participants and their contributions and balancing that with a responsibility to the project, e.g. should the text be left in the order in which it is written (maybe this is a rule of this experiment? is it a scatter piece?) or should I move things around to put related passages in proximity to one another? I haven't worked it all out yet. But I think that the answer lies in a broader consideration of Making Things Better, Making Things Worse.

LR