• 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 I remember about the video of John Paul II Marina Abramovic showed @ Reed in 2006

Liam Drain

In 1979 Pope John Paul II met with an assembly of Catholic youths at Madison Square Garden. The gathering was broadcast live on TV. The stadium was crowded probably to its maximum capacity. A few cardinals and bishops gave talks to get the crowd warmed up. By the time it was the pope's turn on the mic everyone was pretty much in a frenzy.

He sat smiling and chuckling softly. When the crowd calmed a bit, he began to make strange noises imitating the voice of the crowd. It turned into a call and response; the pope's strange, soft utterance, "Wooooooo," and the crowd returning an ecstatic roar. This went on for a good five or ten minutes. The cardinals and bishops were getting nervous. We couldn't tell what they were whispering to each other but their body language made it clear this exchange was not planned. After more "Woooos" the pope said, "This was a charismatic moment." The crowd goes totally crazy. The pope laughed and "Wooooo-d" some more and his exchange with the crowd continued.

At this point it was evident this was much more than an eccentric old man and and frenzied crowd behaving strangely; an extraordinary transformation has occured. Finally, he said, "You know, we will destroy this program," and then the network pulled the plug on the broadcast. This is a true story. Marina Abramovic ended her lecture at Reed College in 2006 with this video as a gift to the audience.

The "charismatic moment" refers to the Charismatic Christian denominations who believe holy spirit appears in our lives in the form of miracles, prophesies and glossolalia.

In the pope's performance the crowd became a medium for both bringing [this thing] into existence and witnessing its power. In the charismatic moment the crowd acted as an organism with emergent properties independent of its parts.