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

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.

“Art is what we do,” Carl Andre once said. “Culture is what is done to us.” Cultural critic Lewis Hyde, invoking the quote, adds, “It’s the ‘done to us’ part I’d like the citizen to avoid; let us be the constant makers of our cultural world.” In a recent conversation about creativity and copyright, democracy and the commons, Hyde expanded on the ideas in his book Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.

“The question is not whether a museum should be a commons, but which model of the commons it should be,” says artists and new media professor Jon Ippolito, who looks at two models he considers highly compromised—the market and the zoo—as well as one he believes is closest to the original spirit of the commons—the tribe.

Rick Prelinger is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a vast collection of advertising, educational, and amateur films 
available for public use. A writer, filmmaker, and longtime advocate for the public domain, Prelinger discusse the Walker’s Open Field initiative, the relationship between commons and museums, and the complications of institutional forays into social practice.