Improv Everywhere: Frozen Grand Central Station

For inspiration: Frozen Grand Central Station, a flashmob intervention by “Improv Everywhere”.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo[/youtube]

There’s already a hint on ‘blind spots’ of specific media:
“Another thing we learned at the Home Depot mission is that it’s really tough to convey this idea through photographs. Everyone is frozen in place in a photo.”

Charlie Todd (2008), founder of “Improv Everywhere”

We don’t expect a photograph to move – do we?

Culture is a medium, and a medium, as any other media, will become ‘visible’ if it stops working. So, what if nearly everybody else starts acting… strange? As Voltaire stated:
“Madness we call the illness of the brain, that keeps a man necessarily from thinking and acting like the others.”

– Voltaire quoted in Foucault (1977), „Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft“, S.176, translation by Tan
“The others” – these are today encountered in new media.

“If there’s nothing wrong with me… maybe there’s something wrong with the universe!”
– Dr. Crusher (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”, “Remember Me”)

Another nice intervention of Improv Everywhere, this time decisively dealing with a social blind spot. In the expensive vacational area of Aspen, Colorado, there are only 0.44% afroamericans…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyRwrrggxok[/youtube]

http://improveverywhere.com/2012/02/06/meet-a-black-person/


Avatar photo

About Wey

My name's Wey-Han Tan, I graduated 2007 as Diplompädagoge (educational scientist) in Hamburg, and 2009 as M.A. in ePedagogy Design. Currently I work at the project "Universitätskolleg" as scientific assistant at the Faculty for Educational Sciences, Psychology and Human Movement at the University of Hamburg. My research interests are game based learning, second order gaming, media theory and (radical) constructivist approaches. I like pen-and-paper-roleplaying, especially in contemporary horror settings like "KULT" or "Call of Cthulhu".
This entry was posted in artistic intervention. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply