OPEN

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.