Open Field: Conversations on the Common
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In the spirit of public exchange, the Walker presents Open Field: Conversations on the Commons, a book examining our three-year experiment in participation and public space. In the hope of giving each piece of content new life, we’re sharing links to every chapter of the book—updated as they are published on various Walker and non-Walker websites—below. These illustrated essays and interviews address the possibilities of a true cultural commons, both within the context of a contemporary art center and beyond.

Learning
By Sarah Schultz & Sarah Peters

Conversations on the Commons: An Introduction

The coeditors of Conversations on the Commons introduce the core idea of Open Field as an experiment in collective creativity in a museum-operated space and lay out the guiding philosophy of the project.

Learning
By Sarah Schultz & Sarah Peters

An Authentic Commons Is Not a Temporary Affair

This writer, filmmaker, founder of the Prelinger Archives, and longtime advocate for the public domain talks about the relationship between commons and museums, and the complications of institutional forays into social practice.

Learning
By Jon Ippolito

Which Commons: 
Market, Zoo, 
or Tribe?

Drawing on historical models of commons, Ippolito outlines different models for collective ownership and ponders which one a museum should follow: one of two highly compromised examples—the market and the zoo—or a prototype closest to the spirit of the commons, the tribe.

Learning
By Sarah Peters & Sarah Schultz

Lewis Hyde: In Defense of the Cultural Commons

Cultural critic Lewis Hyde talks about the idea of the commons as resurrected today after two centuries of tension between the individual and the collective, what it means to be a good cultural citizen, and what the model of a commons can offer to an art institution.

Learning
By Stephen Duncombe & Sarah Peters

Utopia Is No Place

When 2010 Open Field artists-in-residence Red76 invited theorist and activist Stephen Duncombe to give a lecture, his ideas about the uses of utopia in political imagination became fodder for the group’s discussion series. Here, Duncombe talks about collective utopia in relationship to Open Field 2011.

Learning
By Steve Dietz

This Is Not a Trojan Horse

Steve Dietz, founder, president, and artistic director of Northern Lights.mn, deconstructs Open Field 2010 artists-in-residence Futurefarmers’ process, practice, and motivations.

Red76 Interview: If We Had a 
Hammer

Artists-in-residence at the first Open Field, Red76 discusses the five core elements of their three-week project, which explored ways that we repurpose knowledge and materials by inviting people to activate their dual roles as consumers and creators of ideas and things.

Learning
By Shanai Matteson & Colin Kloecker

Commons Census: 
Surveying the Field

Using tactics from Participatory Action Research, the authors reflect on their wide-ranging alternative assessment of Open Field’s first iteration, including interviews with Walker staff and off-site think-tank discussions.

Contributor Biographies