Midtown Manhattan on Saturday, 2nd of October 2010, a few minutes before 6:00pm. The retail stores in the area are quite (one would say unusually) crowded, and many of the customers are wearing headsets, but that is something that very few people would note as strange. Suddenly something happens inside each one of them. The people with the headsets begin to wave and wink at each other, they straighten up the displays, each one holds a product in the air, and then slow dances with it (fig.9-11).
After that, they all leave the stores, they walk on the sidewalk, blending in with the New Yorkers and the tourists and performing funny activities: marching like in a marching band, silly walking, and “high fiving” strangers. Pedestrians all around them watch and laugh. The “mobbers” are walking towards Bryant Park, in the middle of which, a man is sitting all alone wearing a birthday hat and holding a cupcake. The participants (always wearing their headsets) surround the guy and “surprise” him and then they all
68
engage in party games, they exchange gifts, they turn each other into “Toilet Paper Mummies” and, as in a proper birthday party, they dance.
Figures 9-11: Images from: Improv Everywhere (2010)
The “mummy dance party” described above was one of Improv Everywhere’s latest missions. Improv Everywhere is a performance group based in New York City, formed in 2001 by Charlie Todd. The actions/pranks they carry out, called “missions”, are very much similar to the Flash Mobs and their stated goal is to cause “scenes of chaos and joy in public places” (Improv Everywhere webpage). Their name can be read either as
“Improvising Everywhere”, which might be inaccurate as the missions are largely pre-planned, or as “Improve Everywhere” (Todd) and they claim to create events for no cause other than having fun: “We are focused on creating comedy for comedy’s sake and staging events that purposefully have no explicit reason behind them, other than the goal of spreading chaos and joy throughout the world.” (Todd) Potential participants join the group’s mailing list and are notified about future projects and their programmes via email. The “birthday party” described above was the seventh performance in their Mp3 Experiment series.
Figures 12-4: Images from: Improv Everywhere (2010)5
5 “Here’s how it works: we put an original mp3 file online (usually around 45 minutes long) that people download and transfer to their iPods. Participants then synchronize their watches to an atomic clock on our website, head out to the same public location, and blend in with others. At the predetermined time, everyone presses play. Hilarity ensues as participants carry out ridiculous, coordinated instructions delivered to their
69
In this mission, the over 3000 people with the headsets in the retail stores of the wider area around Bryant Park, had downloaded an mp3 file and pressed play simultaneously at 6:00PM. Unlike past events, they wore no identifying clothing, which made it difficult to tell a participant from a non-participant before their activities began. The theme for this year’s performance was “Steve’s birthday party” and right after six o’clock everybody started acting according the instructions of the narrator, or, the “omnipotent voice from above” (The Mp3 Experiment). In the stores, participants were told to do simple things like “pet a product,” “neaten up a display”, “find a
product that’s close to $21 without going over” and slow dance with a product. The acts continued in the streets as the people were heading towards the park where “Steve” was sitting alone: “March like you’re in a marching band”, “Form a long line behind a stranger, copying their every move”, “See how many strangers you can high five”
(Improv Everywhere, 2010). The people who happened to be at the park at that moment suddenly faced 3000 individuals wearing headsets performing absurdly (fig. 12-4).
Always following the recorded instructions, the participants played games, exchanged gifts, took toilet paper out of their bags, wrapped each other and then started dancing.
When the party (and the mp3 track) came to an end, people cleaned up the park and the crowd dispersed within few minutes (fig. 15-7).
Figures 15-7: Images from: Improv Everywhere (2010)
The event may have ended at that point, the people had disappeared, the park was clean and empty, but the whole experiment was not just a memory and an experience for those who took part in it. Apart from their mp3 players, most of the participants and all of the Improv Everywhere “agents” also carried their mobile phones and their cameras
headphones via narrator “Steve” and everyone else tries to figure out what the hell is going on.” (The Mp3 Experiments)
70
with them, and were able to document their personal experience. Videos and images of the performance, each one from a different viewpoint, are now (and most likely forever) uploaded in websites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and, of course, in Improv
Everywhere’ s webpage. In this urban field, everyone is a cyborg: the participants along with their mobile phones and their cameras, their email accounts and their Facebook profiles and friends. And it is because of their complex profiles that they have
participated in this game. The experiment ran from the digital realm to the physical, and back to digital again: it all started by an email circulating among people that have nothing in common apart from their interest in such events, it attempted a physical performance in the city and ended up by being digitally documented and posted on the Internet. A message became an ephemeral act that later became a permanent video online. This is another characteristic of the contemporary technological age: that the digital may be much more enduring and fixed than the physical.
The mp3 experiment challenges the traditional notion of the body in this
multidimensional and heterogeneous city. The body within this city becomes augmented by mobile phones, mp3 players, cameras and other accessories and devices that allow us to understand and also share the way the body functions, performs, and exists in its environment. Improv Everywhere, Flash Mob and related forms of performance art work in a similar way: they use the urban space as a terrain and they create events with the help of new technologies. Such performances illustrate the different levels at which the contemporary city functions. The city as the built environment may be fixed and adjusted to a specific point on the earth, but it is also shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints. In the electronic age the perception of spatiality is also affected by mobility, temporality and connectivity. New technologies have illustrated that the urban environment develops and transforms in relation to the events that take place in it.
Via such actions the city itself becomes a field of mobility and connectivity, and at the same time a place for the event to happen.