Flash Mobs: against the Fixed Body and the Fixed Place

Although at the time that the term cyborg was coined the scientists must have imagined the forthcoming cyborgs to look mostly like the Terminator (1984), the future proved them rather wrong, as cyborgs today do not look much different than what these

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scientists would have called “natural bodies”. In effect, the contemporary cyborgs that we all are – and which Haraway references – are not so much based on the physical modification of the self and the extension of the physical body with the appropriate equipment, as they pursue the extension of the mental self through connectivity. As long as individuals carry with them the proper technology (compressed within

micro-devices), they have access to information and communication and they are capable of producing and sharing “virtual space” and interacting with others in different ways through this space. Digitisation does not necessarily suggest that we are always connected to our networks, nevertheless it changes the way we perceive [virtual or physical] space and our behaviour in it as it gives us the possibility to connect with anyone we want at any time. To do so, we spend time and effort to build and maintain our “second selves” because these avatars will be the media to share information and experiences online. As Haraway predicted in 1995, contemporary cyborgs have mutated to meet the requirements of a world of connectivity and also cyberspace and their most powerful “weapons” to do so are databases and informatics that help those who possess the adequate technology to live their lives through communication, interaction, and participation. And as the human body turns hybrid/cyborg, the world around turns hybrid/cyborg too (or vice-versa, as the world turns hybrid, the body turns hybrid too), combining the physical with the digital presence, the instant communication with the geographical distance, the specific place with the infinite expansion of space. This is what experiments like the T-Mobile commercial, the mp3 project by Improv

Everywhere, and the Flash Mobs illustrate: that it is no longer a matter of physical presence or virtual presence, but about the synthesis of the two and the possibilities that this opens up in terms of the creation of new complex spaces and our activity in them.

Flash Mob-like performances playfully – and with the help of digital media – highlighted that the idea of “non-fixed place” is not necessarily a characteristic of cyberspace, but it equally occurs within the physical world. A simple e-mail was

enough to activate a virtual community (a group of people that did not necessarily know each other but shared common interests) to assemble and do something different in the city.

“I wanted to use e-mail to get people come to some sort of show, where something surprising would happen… the point of the show would be no show at all: the e-mail would be straightforward about exactly what people would see, namely nothing but

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themselves, coming together for no reason at all. Such a project would work, I reflected, because it was meta, i.e. it was a self-conscious idea for a self-conscious culture, a promise to create something out of nothing.” (Wasik, 2009, p.19).

This “something out of nothing” (the “something” here being the event, while the

“nothing being the cyberspace that exists nowhere) that Bill Wasik attempted to create through the Flash Mobs (and by extension the T-Mobile commercial and the Improv Everywhere performances) was made possible by using volunteering individuals and their electronic extensions, in this case, their emails. In his book (2009) Wasik describes his first – failed – and his second successful attempt to organise these initial mob

projects. On May 27, 2003 he sent an e-mail (titled “MOB#1”, without knowing whether this would be followed by a “MOB#2”) to sixty-three friends and

acquaintances, asking them to participate in the “MOB”, a project that would last ten minutes or less, and to forward that e-mail to any of their friends that would be

interested to join (Wasik, 2009, p.5). At precisely 7:24pm the following Tuesday – June 3 – the mob was to assemble at a small chain store that sold hair accessories in central Manhattan. At 7:31, after exactly seven minutes – watches were advised to be

synchronised with the U.S. government’s atomic clocks – the crowd would disperse:

“NO ONE, the email cautioned, SHOULD REMAIN AT THE SITE AFTER 7:33”

(Wasik, 2009, p.6). On the day that the event was scheduled, and while Wasik was preparing to go to the mob site – not knowing what to expect, a friend of his called him to let him know that six policemen and a police van were standing outside the little store, not allowing anyone to enter. Wasik arrived at the site, yet he never saw his

“mob” realised, as no one could understand how many of the people that had gathered watching the policemen – some of them filming them – had been there to take part in it.

However, sensing that the principles that he had set up were right, he soon went on organising Mob#2 by amending Mob#1. Wasik realised that the mistake he had made was that he revealed the final destination to the participants at the first place. Two weeks later at the second event, the participants gathered at four bars – split according to the month of their birth – around the intended destination that Wasik had chosen. Ten minutes before the scheduled event, slips of paper revealing the mob site and the action were distributed at the bars (Wasik, 2009, p.21). The mob site was the rugs section, at the ninth and uppermost floor of a large department store of Manhattan (Macy’s): “all at once, in a giant rush, two hundred people wandered over to the carpet in the back left

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corner and, as instructed, informed clerks that they all lived together in a Long Island Commune and were looking for a ‘love rug’” (Wasik, 2009, p.21). Shortly after that, Wired News, a technology-news website posted an article titled “E-mail Mob Takes Manhattan” (Wasik, 2009, p.21) and Wasik’s anonymous webmail account was swarmed with interview requests. As the news spread, potential “mobbers” in other cities were asking information and advice for organising their own mobs. Since then, the mobs have spread in hundreds of cities around the world, through popular themes such as the “freeze”, the “dance”, and the “pillow fight”, and through others, more original and “localised” ideas.

Flash Mobs are here examined within the cyborg-world framework because they suggest a playful way to breach the boundaries between the physical and the non-physical, of what is considered as “real” and what is considered as “virtual”, towards a new order of hybridity of things. Although they cannot be considered as a miniature of the contemporary world, but rather as an absurd outburst of it, Flash Mobs suggest an interesting phenomenon of the context of digitisation that has been transformed and extended in various versions ever since⁶. Besides, if, according to Haraway’s argument above, we are moving “from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous,

informational system – from all work to all play, a deadly game” (Haraway, 1991, p.161) , then it might be easier to read the characteristics of this new order, in which

“we are all cyborgs”, in playful urban conditions like the Flash Mobs. This transition to a polymorphous informational system does not, of course, come without consequences.

The transformations that digitisation promotes are not applied evenly in the world, with only a small percentage of the world’s population being able to enjoy the technological advances and the endless connectivity that the forthcoming era is promising. The

“deadly game” in Haraway’s words suggests that, despite this playful attitude, what needs to be acknowledged here is the fact that disparities in the world tend to widen and not everybody is in a position of privilege in relation to this new order of presumed equality and hybridity of things.

In the cyborg-world analysed above, the body transforms to suit its environment.

Similarly, in the Flash Mobs the body embraces connectivity – with the help of the adequate devices – in order to gain access to the urban play and the hybridity of the

6 from organised performances and synchronised actions in different cities around the world, to political demonstrations and riots instantly organised via text messages

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world. Physicality and connectivity, digital profiles and physical bodies mix in a

complex reality. In this complex reality, the natural is impossible to distinguish from the cultural – if it could, the game would have been pointless: an email activates a group of people to leave their desktops and participate in a public performance, but this

performance would not have been possible if these individuals were not connected through a virtual community. Fiction and lived experience, imagination and material reality that easily blend in virtual communities, are here realised within the urban scene (fig.18). Apart from the transformation of a virtual community into a physical

performance, Flash Mobs illustrate that there is not so much distance between one’s digital and physical self, and that in a cyborg-world all the different fragments of us may come together in multiple ways. Further, dominations of race, gender, class, and sexuality that Haraway aims to break down using the cyborg metaphor have no place in a Flash Mob. The mob’s sole origin is the virtual community that forms for the event and disappears thereafter. Just like our avatars stand for us in a virtual reality world, the role of the physical body in a Flash Mob comes to represent the digital profile from the virtual community in the physical world, therefore classifications have no place here.

Figure18: The first Augmented Reality Flash Mob⁷ (SNDRV).

7 On Saturday the 24th of April 2010, the first Augmented Reality Flash Mob took place in Dam Square, Amsterdam. People were asked to prepare their smart phones by

installing the adequate Augmented Reality software, chose their favourite avatar-character (from a list of popular avatar-characters) and swarm the square with “virtual human sculptures” (SNDRV). Sander Veenhof conceived this interesting event taking up from

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Then the body in the Flash Mobs escapes all conventional roles assigned to it, and enacts the digital persona that stands behind it. Accordingly, the space around the body escapes established categories too. Flash Mobs illustrate that we cannot distinguish between the virtual space that envelopes digital profiles and personae, and the physical space that envelopes the physical body and the self. If, according to Haraway, objects, bodies, spaces can no longer be listed as natural and artificial, but are made of

components that communicate in a common language, then the world around us is a hybrid space that combines our online activity and our digital interactions with our physical activities and actions in the city. The place in Flash Mobs, following the mobility of the body that follows the flexibility that connectivity has introduced, escapes any notion of fixity and stability. Due to connectivity, central locations within the city change for a few minutes and soon change back to normal. If placeness has to do with meanings, attachments, and narratives, then place here follows the mob: the

“mobbers” create this “instant” sort of place, they bring with them new narratives and meanings in the city that develop within a few minutes and last as long as the mob lasts, and then they transform into digital stories stored into servers and hard discs.

Interestingly, Wasik’s initial mistake – described above – outlines one of the key features in the success of Flash Mobs. By thinking conventionally, Wasik revealed the final destination of the performance in the very first mob announcement. But location in Flash Mobs – and by extension within digitisation – is temporary, and as such fleeting and instant. For this reason it should have been kept secret until the last moment.