collective play

Following upon the massive YouTube success of a video from their February 2007 (uploaded in January 2008 - over 6 million views!) "Frozen Grand Central" mission (which spawned similar scenes of people frozen in motion in London and elsewhere), Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere, was on the Today show last week while a small group of IE "agents" replicated their waxworks play on the ropeline outside.   A few days earlier, the group was also featured on ABC's Nightline.

Originally founded in August 2001 in New York City (preceding the flash mob phenomenon of summer 2003, although they really started  hitting their stride in 2003), Improv Everywhere is a loose creative collective which "causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places".  (http://improveverywhere.com ). 

There are things I absolutely love about certain IE missions (and for full disclosure: I have participated in several, including "Even Better than the Real Thing" (May 2005 - a fake roof concert by U2 : you can see me bouncing around yelling "Bono Bono" in the background).  Among my favorites:

• The Moebius - March 2003 (a series of unrelated events repeat themselves again and again in the Astor Place Starbucks)
• Look Up More - March 2005 (the windows of Union Square South become the site of a dance-fest)
• Cell Phone Symphony - February 2006 (the bag-check of the Strand becomes the site of a cacophonous symphony of ringtones)

Occasionally their missions have an almost intimate feel (like Romantic Comedy Cab (July 2005: can a friendly cab driver make the connection between the stories told by two of his riders and bring the couple back together?)), while others take on corporate culture (No Shirts (October 2007: Abercrombie & Fitch), Redheads (July 2007: Wendy's), Slo-Mo Home Depot (August 2006), Best Buy (April 2006)).  Some, like Frozen Grand Central, are a massive splash of verve (as too the various MP3 experiments and No-Pants subway rides).

I realize that my own zen "poethics" privilege certain smaller IE missions over others and that what interests me most is precisely a glint of magical awe in the midst of the mundane city, while my punk-anarchist heart is also attracted to the anti-corporate gesture.  Nevertheless, something about the sheer size of some of the recent missions, or the overly-scripted nature of some (the MP3 Experiment 2.0 (October 2005) made me feel like a passive cog following the silly commands of the disembodied voice in the sky) has left me cold.

An anecdote: I came back to New York after a summer abroad and in my first day wandering around outside my East Village apartment, I noticed what I took to be a radical change in fashion from the last time I had been in the city: all the boys were dressed in spangles, feathers and wigs as if Madison avenue had decreed the transgendered look as this year's style.  It was only later that I realized that Wigstock (the outdoor drag festival, http://www.wigstock.nu ) was taking place in Tompkin's Square that day; fashions returned to their norms the following morning.

What I love about my mistake was the lingering incertitude I was in, and my attempt to understand the irregular within a rational schema.  (addendum: check out the "what's the benefit" observer in IE's Mobile Desktop mission from this month: "(That's) the strangest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Have you seen that in another Starbucks? Is it like a new trend or what? What’s the benefit? Do you know what the benefit is?")  This method was also the hallmark of the first two Improv Everywhere No-Pants missions in which there were only a handful of participants riding the January subway in their boxers.  The latest No-Pants missions, however, are so massive that the non-participant's wonder is crushed by the collective and the missions have effectively become pants-less subway parties (similar to the NYC "One Night of Fire" performance party).  The charming Warp Zone mission (April 2002) put a number of random agents in a store humming, then singing, the theme to Cheers, as if by infectious exuberance; the employees were, on the whole, taken in by the scam.  If 300 agents started to sing, the slight-of-hand would be revealed. 

I realize that my criticisms may seem to imply a infatuation with the elite, marginal and secret, but I remain thoroughly enthusiastic about a (largely youth) culture that still enjoys collective play and provocation, and that hasn't been reduced to passively consuming what big-media has prepared for them.

As my case makes apparent, one's reactions to public collaborative works such as those of Improv Everywhere are highly subjective (for whom are the works intended? for the participants? for the viewing public? for the creator? for the YouTube spectator? can a work succeed for one of these, but fail for the others?) and participants may be drawn to these acts by a host of conflicting desires, including:

• the desire to participate in a marginal enterprise or secret group
• the pleasure of collusion with an inside-joke or scam
• the desire to throw a spanner in the works of big-box retailers
• the desire to "épater les bourgeois" or shock out-of-towners
• the desire to create magic or mystery in the modern city
• the hope of meeting artsy new people
• a sense of humor or mercurial exhibitionism

The reactions of non-participant participants - the hapless employees and bystanders that confront the act - are carefully catalogued in the IE's agent reports.  Officious security guards and angry managers seem to justify, to a large degree, all the chaos they are forced to confront with their humorless drudgery.  The litany of friendly "that was so strange/cool" comments, and, in certain missions, the questions about whether the chaos is random or a prank are charming reactions.  As pranks though, some of the missions are not without their darker side, especially when the victims are a well-meaning bunch of Joes; these dynamics have been wonderfully explored in a 2005 episode ("Mind Games") by the radio show This American Life which did a study of the "Best Gig Ever" mission in which IE agents made out that they were hardcore fans of the unknown band Ghosts of Pasha playing their first tour. (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=286  )  The story was also reused in episode one season one of the T.A.L. television show ("Reality Check" http://www.thisamericanlife.org/TV_Episode.aspx?episode=1 )

These ambivalent reactions are all in the nature of "play" itself which can be both a form of socializing and exclusion, both useful and purposeless, both fun and dangerous, as nicely described in a recent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine called "Taking Play Seriously" by Robin Marantz Henig (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/magazine/17play.html ) 

(NB: I would have liked to see a broader discussion of play as it appears in the social theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, for whom human action can be interpreted largely from the perspective of strategic action and game play, including one's participation in fields of cultural production (the arts, academia, politics, literature) in which implicit and explicit rules of action define our gestures and give us meaning.  For example: the non-participant in the "game" of abstract art decries the canvas as worthless; the MFA, whose education has been centered on believing the game worth playing and the results of great import, grogs the De Kooning.)

Improv Everywhere has been going through a massive expansion lately, their "No Pants 2008" mission was replicated in numerous cities around the world, and there is now an IE Facebook group (group id=5021079203) and a global social network (http://improveverywhere.ning.com ).  It is hard to know whether success will spoil the fun.  The 2003 flash mobs of New York were victims both of their own success and of our contemporary auto-documenting obsessions: the number of participants increased exponentially (what else was there to do that summer?), one out of two with cell-phones or video cameras filming the action, and somehow the quirky magical "in-the-moment" event became highly scripted self-aware pageants.  Will Improv Everywhere avoid a similar fate?