OPEN ACTION dotcom (still from recording), May 2 2020.
John Boehme: OPEN ACTION dotcom
May 2, 2020 at 7PM
Presented in partnership with Arts Council Windsor & Region.
OPEN ACTION is a monthly laboratory for exploration of Performance Art, where every month a new location is randomly chosen and new performative actions occur during a variable timeframe. These events are open to anyone to attend.
OPEN ACTION events are an open invitation to any artist in the community and to any observers. Through the act of witnessing, participants embody a common responsibility towards being engaged, being critical, and being open to the possibility of a paradigm shift in perception of self, others and contested sites of encounter.
OPEN ACTION was born from a collective of performance artists based in Victoria, BC, Canada. On May 2nd, OPEN ACTION dotcom took place on ZOOM, from backyards, empty streets and living rooms across Canada. Participants were encourages to make performance art within this framework to consider relationship to the digital realm used to connect your action with the actions of others. Since 2010, once a month, OPEN ACTION artists meet at a pre-selected site to perform simultaneous individual actions. Each artist responds independently to the site’s compressed layers of history, material evidence, pedestrian activity, aural and visual phenomena and unforeseen elements, all filtered through her or his evolving sensibilities and practices. The nuances of the individual actions intersect with one another in unplanned and surprising ways, inviting the casual observer to consider what is taking place and how they are implicated, or not, in the actions performed.