Grand Central Station freeze out
6 February 2008
Andrew Curry writes:
Is it an event? Is it an experience? Is it play? Is it participation? Is it performance? Probably all five. ImprovEverywhere’s recent two hundred person ‘freeze’ at Grand Central Station is another example of the type of shared participatory private-but-public moment which is enabled by digital media – and amplified by it, through YouTube and Flickr.
Watching the video, I was also reminded of the work of the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who combined ethnography and social sciences research to test how people constructed meaning, sometimes with not so hilarious results. (In one famous experiment, in an age when the ethical limits on research were, well, looser, he sent students home for the vacation with the instruction to treat their family home as a boarding house. Quite a few got thrown out.)
The Grand Central Station freeze lasted for only five minutes, but in less than that time passers-by have moved from confusion to interpretation to action – and the two minute video catches this whole process brilliantly.
[Thx to Core 77 for the tip]
Entry Filed under: culture. .
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