“Embarrassed of the Whole (EotW)” is an opera of operations in three Phases.
Phase I involved a sequence of relational processes across the USA, researching (de)liberation, (as)(en)(re)(dis)semblance, affection/affectivity, and holistic worldviews.
Each process in each Phase has its own context-specific form, researching, generating, and designing forms of social engineering and social construction via methodological practicing. Throughout “Embarrassed of the Whole,” PPL are researching and practicing HOW “worldviews” are consciously and intentionally engineered through interfacings, communications, and embodied relationships. We are interested in conflicts between the online and the in-person, between the ontological and the epistemic, between the mechanistic and the affective. Tentatively, we posit embarrassment as the only sure symptom of a moment of social agency (if not “free action”), of being somehow other-wise.
EotW is a hole, a cut, or sort of tunnel burrowing across three categories: ONE: PPL publically gather groups of individuals to collectively philosophize and research “social engineering and social construction” in workshops and focus groups. TWO: PPL frame, initiate, gather, chart and index user-performances online through a website of surveys and quizzes, and THREE: PPL form interpretation-schemas to turn “data” from both the publically-gathered groups and the online interfaces into scores, using these scores to engineer live, public, performances.
Involved and interrelated Phase I operations were performed at places and in contexts including:
The School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Practice, to Practice, an exchange, digital process and live performance)
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (Radical Constructivism in Performance Art workshop)
Curating Performance as Performance Practice conference, Berlin, DE (Diagram Your Artistic Practice, diagramming interface and live presentation)
MAD Theory Performance Philosophy conference (Do-Nuts online process and live-streamed performance)
Attempts to Assimilate (ATA) I as part of Lumen Festival, Staten Island NY
]performance space[ in London as part of Alternatives to Now (live process)
Teach Me IV at Vox Populi, Philadelphia PA
Teach Me III at Temple of the Dog, Pittsburgh PA
Teach Me II at the Spot Tavern, West Lafayette IN
Intersubjective Methodological Survey as part of Grey Spaces at the Wild Project, New York NY
Presenting As You at Dixon Place, New York NY
Apply for the Great American Performance Art Festival at Grace Exhibition Space as part of the Great American Performance Art Festival
Teach Me I at Brooklyn Fire Proof, Brooklyn NY
Action Research performed as part of Bushwick Open Studios at Panoply Performance Laboratory, Brooklyn NY
Three Intentional Failures II as part of the Bunker Projects, Pittsburgh PA
Three Intentional Failures I at House of Trial, Toledo OH
Three Intentionally Disconnected Failures at CAID, Detroit MI
Distance (de)liberation at Canterbury House, Ann Arbor MI
(de)liberation Operation II at Warsaw Room, Cincinnatti OH
(de)liberation Operation IV at Moynihan Station during SPRING BREAK at Armory Art Fair, New York NY
(de)liberation Operation III at PULSAR, Brooklyn NY
(de)liberation Operation V and Embarrassed of the Whole #17 workshop at LACUNA, Portland OR
(de)liberation Operation I at Gowanus Ballroom, Brooklyn NY
Affaction Research Center at Rapid Pulse, Chicago IL
Affection Do Nots at Long Island Arts Festival, Queens NY
Affect Transfer at No Nation, Chicago IL
A Philosophy of Significant Patterns at Spectacle Island, Boston NY
Critical Eye Contact at the New Museum, New York NY
Center for Marooned Citizens as part of undergroundzero, New York NY