Participatory-art research stream
Experiments in Being Together
One condition changes. Everything else becomes visible.
Where this stream came from
Before there were Experiments, there was COURAGE.
Experiments in Being Together grew from questions first made visible through COURAGE: Nude Yoga, a recurring Charles Mindful Wellness practice that began before the Research Program existed.
COURAGE stands outside the Experiments: a sustained practice with a compound social condition of shared nudity, reciprocal participation, no spectators, no recording, consent before undressing, privacy agreements, bodily movement, and Black queer centering.
Maintaining that condition over time made one thing increasingly difficult to treat as background:
the social condition is part of the design.
- Who can look.
- Who has to participate.
- What remains private.
- What happens before consent.
- Which forms of refusal remain available.
- Who the practice was built for.
The later Experiments take that discovery beyond yoga.
Instead of sustaining one recurring condition, each Experiment deliberately alters one familiar rule of social life and studies what the gathering does with the change.
The Practice Site came first. The research stream begins where the alteration becomes deliberate.
The stream
One rule changes
What happens to social life when one ordinary rule stops functioning as inevitable?
Most gatherings arrive with instructions nobody wrote down. Speak quickly. Appear interested. Perform enough energy. Explain yourself. Finish what you begin. Be understandable. Compete. Network. Accept the host’s authority. Keep the conversation moving. These become visible when somebody violates them. This stream makes that visibility deliberate, then suspends the rule for the length of an evening so the people present work out the answer together. No performance required.
The social condition is part of the artwork, alongside the object, room, interface, projection, or performance: who can speak, who can stay silent, whether something has to be explained, whether there is a winner, whether unfinished work has value, whether “no” interrupts play or becomes part of its mechanics, whether rest counts as participation, whether a person can stay opaque.
The working hypothesis
When people inhabit a deliberately altered social condition with meaningful choices about how they participate, previously backgrounded expectations may become easier to perceive, question, resist, rehearse, or redesign. The word may is carrying weight. Changing a rule guarantees no liberation. An alternative condition can reproduce the same hierarchy in another form. An invitation can become a demand. Choice can be symbolic rather than consequential. One participant’s freedom can become another participant’s burden. Sometimes changing the condition changes very little. The record has to hold all of that.
Participation is broader than compliance
Participation is how a person enters the unfolding situation through presence, action, interpretation, relation, observation, contribution, refusal, or withdrawal. A good participant is not the person who does everything offered. Making, speaking, moving, witnessing, resting, changing your mind, staying private, staying still, withholding, leaving, returning, refusing: all of it counts.
Participation implies no equal power. A guest, a facilitator, a venue owner, a funder, an institution, a designer, a technological system, and a physical environment all affect what happens while holding radically different capacities to set or change the conditions. So the experiments ask who can make their participation consequential, who sets the condition, who can change it, who can refuse it without disproportionate penalty, and who bears the consequences.
What the gathering does with the altered condition is part of the artwork. What can be documented as research remains governed by separate consent, provenance, and evidence rules.
Who this centers
The work thinks from Black queer life. That changes references, permissions, privacy, humor, risk, who is assumed to belong, and whose comfort does not become the default measure. Some events are for Black queer participants specifically; most are open to the broader QTBIPOC community; a small number invite general public participation. Shared identity does not imply shared experience.
Five experiments · seeking venues and partners
Five experiments
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Unfinished
A studio party where nothing has to be finished, explained, or justified.
What changesNobody is required to finish, justify, optimize, or publicly explain what they are making.
Protected communal time for anyone whose work has been interrupted by isolation, overwork, caregiving, fear, or lack of space. Unfinished work becomes the raw material of a collective installation instead of private evidence of failure.
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One Question All Night
The whole gathering stays with one question, encountered through movement, writing, sound, and silence.
What changesThe gathering refuses the pressure to cover many subjects and remains with one public question all night.
A slower form of dialogue that doesn't depend on public speaking, debate, or quick verbal confidence.
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No Explanation Necessary
An exhibition-party where guests present something meaningful without ever having to explain what it means.
What changesParticipants may present something meaningful without being required to interpret or translate it for others.
Relief for people routinely expected to explain their identities, bodies, histories, or creative choices before being granted recognition.
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Social Weather
Internal states expressed through color, texture, sound, and movement instead of words.
What changesParticipants do not have to answer “How are you?” with a conventional emotional label or personal explanation.
Space for people who prefer metaphor, movement, or privacy over direct disclosure. The gathering's collective mood becomes a shared, anonymous, responsive artwork.
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Silent Party
Spoken conversation is suspended for the central portion of the party.
What changesGesture, movement, writing, signage, food, dance, and a shared communication lexicon carry the interaction instead of speech.
Sociability is usually demonstrated through verbal fluency, quick response, and spoken availability. Prototype 00 asks which routes to sociality become visible when speech loses its default authority.
Black queer-centered is a design condition
Black queer life shapes the starting assumptions of the work rather than being fitted into a form built around white queer or heterosexual Black norms. It affects what is protected, what can remain opaque, how privacy is handled, what kinds of participation count, and who does not have to explain themselves before belonging. Race, sexuality, and gender are inseparable, so the fight against racism has to include the fight against homophobia, and the other way around.
Centering does not flatten difference. Class, disability, nationality, gender identity and expression, age, religion, body history, geography, politics, and other differences remain active inside the room. No single Black queer narrative is asked to stand in for all of them.
The work is also situated in Washington, DC, where Black queer public worldmaking has a long documented history, including William Dorsey Swann’s nineteenth-century drag gatherings.
A public research specification for every work
Every work publishes its familiar condition, the underlying structure that arrangement may sustain, the alteration and what deliberately stays unchanged, the hypothesis, what it tests, the encounter participants inhabit, and the complication, meaning what the work does not claim and what could make the hypothesis wrong. After a work runs, the record adds observed consequence, null or resistance, unevenness, emergence, and revision.
Each work carries enough provenance to show what its claims rest on, and leaves out the facilitator score, technical system, moderation tree, research instrument, and internal analysis procedure.
Silent Party, as currently specified
- Familiar condition
- Spoken conversation organizes most party interaction and hosting.
- Underlying structure
- Social competence and availability get judged through speed, verbal fluency, hearing norms, and willingness to speak.
- Alteration
- Spoken conversation is suspended for the central portion.
- Hypothesis
- If speech loses its default authority, participants may redistribute attention across gesture, proximity, movement, visual cue, and silence.
- What it tests
- Conditions shape participation. Multimodal sociality. Silence as participation. Consequential inequality among communication modes.
- Encounter
- Gesture, movement, writing, signage, visual systems, food, dance and a shared communication lexicon carry the interaction instead. Lighting, spatial design and sound replace the conventional authority of spoken hosting. The evening ends with a ceremonial return to speech.
- Complication
- Silence is not automatically inclusive. Removing speech can produce new exclusions, especially where visual, written, spatial, or sensory alternatives are weak.
What we’re seeking
Arts and cultural funding, presenting institutions and venues, community advisers, artists and facilitators, and participants interested in attending or helping shape a future edition.
Interest and partnership inquiries · Connect
Where to go from here
Developing repertoire
The larger repertoire also holds works investigating temporary society and friendship, consent, social algorithms, governance, futurity, noncompetitive play, distributed hosting, unresolved obligation, and the city as a retreat environment. These stay developing works until their condition maps, access plans, ethics, artistic grammar, and production requirements are strong enough for public presentation.
Five ways in
Venues and festivals host these. Everyone else attends.
Funding, partnership, press, or something that is not an event? Start here.