I’ve been thinking about how flashmobs have become an institution in their own right. Yesterday I received an invite to a flashmob due to be scheduled at Liverpool St between 18:24 and 18:28pm – this one in the form of a London Freeze:
Flashmobs are something I’ve watched over the net with interest as they pop up here and there, but I’d never actually been involved in one, so I decided to take part. I couldn’t decide whether to go as a participant or as an observer and film it, but I figured there would be plenty of footage around on the net afterwards, so I sent the message round to friends and headed for Liverpool Street.
On arriving about 15 minutes before it was due to start, I felt I could tell who already knew what was going to happen and was there for the purpose of the event. There were plenty of the average businessman watching the board waiting for his train, but even 15 minutes beforehand there were people starting to hang around as if they were waiting for something, shifting about, looking at their mobile or checking the time repeatedly. More and more people started to turn up with cameras. I don’t think you would have noticed anything out of the ordinary if you weren’t aware something was about to happen, but if you were you could guess who was there for the purpose. People started congregating over the barriers to watch…what? A couple of minutes before 18:24 rows of cameras started to pile up on the level above…
I hadn’t thought too much about how I was going to pose but I suddenly started to wonder if I should pose with the camera on as if about to shoot a picture or what. A few seconds before 18:24 I just started to pace along and at 18:24 on the dot, froze – mid-pace, coffee in hand aiming towards mouth…
Four minutes is one hell of a long time when you are doing absolutely nothing except breathing…I’d set my mobile to go off at the start and end times so I’d know from its buzzing what to do, but (being a moron) it hadn’t occurred to me time to sync this with the clock on the wall – so it was vibrating away in my pocket mid-freeze, which was interesting but not quite what I had planned. I see now that that is exactly why every bugger in Liverpool Street was checking their mobile and the clock endlessly the few minutes before…next time…
As my mid-pace had stopped with me looking away from the clock I had no idea how long I’d been there. However at about 2min 30 I noticed the woman in front of me had planned hers so that she appeared to be taking a photo of her two friends who were smiling merrily away at the camera – but looking at her LCD I could see the time running, and she was actually videoing it, what a great idea…
I spent most of the 4 minutes wondering if the general public were actually even noticing what was happening. People kept on milling around, but this is London, and a busy station at rush hour at that. Who in London ever speaks to a stranger, looks them in the face, pays attention to them, or even says ‘excuse me’ instead of barging on through? Or indeed finds it anything out of the ordinary if people don’t move out of their way or just look slightly odd? Odd doesn’t exist in London.
It wasn’t until 2 and half, maybe three minutes that anyone started to notice and the only way I could tell was that the station had gone quiet and people had stopped barging through. I guess as they noticed more and more and more ‘oddness’ they started to look around them and see that it was everywhere. They stopped yelling into their mobile phones for a minute or two, stopped marching along and pushing through, just for a minute…
And then it was all over – the clock turned, we finished off what we had started doing 4 minutes ago, and a hundred or so little voices poured together to make one big cheer before we all quickly ran away back into our Wednesday night.
There’s already a news story on it here, videos here and here.
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Research
So that’s my personal research into a flashmob. You can’t get more direct research than in actually being a part of it. But since then I’ve been looking more into the history of flashmobs – where they came from, where they are, why they are – and why I see them as an institution now.
Perhaps the most well-known flashmob was the Freeze at Grand Central in New York, probably because it is one of the highest-viewed videos on youtube and because of its presentation more than anything – in fact its organiser, Improv Everywhere, claim it wasn’t a flashmob at all but just one of their ‘missions’ which they claim to be ‘pranks in public places‘, and that this was something they did well before flashmobs became well known.
Definition
So what exactly is a flashmob? Wiki defines it as “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.” Webster’s dictionary defines it as “a group of people who organize on the Internet and then quickly assemble in a public place, do something bizarre, and disperse“.
The sudden strangeness of it is the key, as well as the ’secrecy’. A large number of people doing something suddenly at the same time, and then just as suddenly disappearing again. Flashmobs spread by text and by email just hours before the event. They don’t even have to be doing anything unusual in itself – just the fact that 200 all of a sudden WANT to buy a first class stamp in the same place is adequate. It just makes it that bit more bizarre having so many people at once. But most flashmobs are faintly bizarre. They come in many types – doing something, or not doing something. Silently dancing, asking strange questions, singing, suddenly freezing.
History of Flashmobs
The most recent in London before yesterday was the Rick Astley flashmob on April 11th when 300-400 people descended on Liverpool Street at 17:59, some in masks, counted down to 18:00 then all sang ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, which thinking back to my teenage years was weird in enough in 1987. This was part of a series of Rickrollin’ events which aren’t flashmobs themselves but are well worth a mention – Rickrollin’ involves web links redirecting to good ol’ Rick’s music vid. As an April fool’s joke this year various media companies and websites did this, including YouTube who rickrolled all of its featured videos on that day.
More recent Flashmobs have included Mobile Clubbing at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall on 12 October where hundreds of people turned up with their ipods, and at 7:01pm all started dancing to their own beat:
There’s also a video here
This is a form of Silent Disco as to anyone without the ipod everyone is dancing away to silence. Mobile Clubbing started in 2003, founded by Ben Cummins and Emma Davis, who also run Pillow Fight Club, another version of flashmob where everyone appears (with a pillow) at the designated time and has said pillow fight. These don’t instanly disperse at any set time though, they go on until the job’s done, so they’re different from a standard flashmob in that respect.
Another mobile disco is archived here, from the 11th October 2006 at 18:24 (seems a popular time). This came with a set of Rules:
This was said to be a multiple flashmob happening at the same time in Madrid, New York and Paris.
The first Global Flashmob was also London Flashmob 4 on 25th October 2003, the Rules for this one are here.
It is claimed the first flashmob was planned for Manhattan in May 2003 by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper’s Magazine, but was unsuccessful after the shop it was planned for was tipped off. The first successful flashmob was organised by the same man and is known as the love-rug mob of June 3, 2003. More than 100 people converged on the 9th floor rug department of Macy’s department store, Manhattan. They had originally met in 4 pre-arranged bars, where they were given further instructions just before the event began. They then suddenly gathered en-masse around an expensive rug, and if questioned had to reply that they all lived together, made purchase decisions as a group and were shopping for a “love rug”.
Later flashmobs included 200 people flooding the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in synchronized applause for 15 seconds, and an invasion of a shoe boutique in Soho by people pretending to be tourists on a bus trip.
The point in Flashmobs
Wasik claims he created flash mobs as a social experiment to poke fun at hipsters and highlight conformity, how the masses deperately want to be in the in-crowd or “the next big thing.”
It is claimed flashmobs were inspirted by the arts and social movements of the 60’s.
Flashmobs as a Social Institution – Performance Art, Collaborative Art
I chose flashmobs for their resemblance to an institution despite this supposed anti-conformity. I see it as a form of performance art, collaborative art. It is not clear who is the artist, who are participants and who is the viewer. The whole event is the art. It wouldn’t exist without the viewer, without the participants and without the organisers, it is a collaborative piece, and in this way it is more than the sum of its parts. it needs all parts to actually occur, but even so any specific part is replacable. There is no identity to the specific performer or viewer. Also it is open to anyone – you don’t need to be ‘an artist’. ‘ a performer’ – anybody who wants to can join in and be a part of it – and any one who wants to create an event can do so. It reminds me of Nicholas Bourriaud’s remarks in Relational Aesthetics – once people are involved in a collaborative work they are no longer spectators, they are contributing. The audience, artist, organisers, anyone at all are on the same level and are of equal value, there is no separation between artist and audience.
Speaking to my mother after the event her first question was ‘But why?’ 
But this seems to be a question in any form of art, but why not? For the fun, for the sheer hell of it! Looking at other people’s answers to this question on the net I got the following:
“It works because there is no ideological point behind it”
“It’s just about doing something fun,”
“The point is that there is no point, we do it for fun, we do it because we
can.”
“I get the impression that it’s a performance art piece, but I think that more than that it is just supposed to be silly in the way that performance art is supposed to be.”
“just some geeks having fun,”
X: “What is the game all about?” Y: “I have no idea, they are stuck in time?”
“a lot of people now spend a lot of their lives behind computer screens talking to and exchanging messages with people, often close friends, who they never see in person”
“This is a way of evolving that computer social interaction back to reality,”
“technology makes it much easier to contact the community and get it moving. It could mark the start of the largely unseen net population realising the latent power of its millions of members.”
It’s about fun, it’s new and fascinating and hilarious, and it’s about the way the internet has changed our lives – we ‘know’ people we have never met in our lives, we can communicate in a second. But it can be used as a tool as well. Bill Wasik’s original aim was in a way political – poking fun at the conformers. But it attracts such attention it can be used to make a statement too. Shutdown Day are planning a version to try to see how long we can manage without a computer to make a statement.
Back to Institutions – the wiki on Institutions says:
“Structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals. Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior. The term, institution, is commonly applied to customs and behavior patterns important to a society“
Social order and co-operation. Transcending human lives and intentions. Rules governing co-operative human behaviour.
It is a completely social thing. It is about behaviour, co-operation and rules – and about transcending these – it being more than the some of its parts, and parts being exchangeable. Back to Bourriaud – it is about breaking down boundaries between positions, and becoming a thing-in-itself.
Some links:
