How do we Measure the Responsibility of a Crowd?

Performance at Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern 19th September 2005

The research theorises the engagement of collectives and crowds in art and non-art live events. It takes Hannah Arendt’s model of a ‘space of appearance’, Bourriard’s relational aesthetics and the theoretical depiction of ‘we collectivity’ put forward by Jean-luc Nancy and Irit Rogoff as points of departure. In these models, a space or specific site is determined as a locus of specific attention. An activated relationship then spreads out from the individual or the few to engage the interest of multiple individuals or crowd.

In the Tate performance, a number of models of cultural behaviour were referred to in art and non-art fields included the social dynamics of crowd behaviour in the sports stadium turned public shelter following Hurricane Katrina and the appearance of a bottle-nosed whale in the River Thames which caused crowd movements following its passage through the water. Analogies were then drawn with art practices since the 1960s including performance art and spectator engagement in contemporary art installations

A symposium organised by the researcher was held on November 17th 2006 University of Ulster in which the participants took an aspect of the title. No single participant could respond to the whole title. Participants included theorist John Reardon, art historian Pamela Lee and artist Cristobel Bianchi.

A paper in the Department of Education and Learning for Northern Ireland funded Footnotes, ‘The Artist- Speaker’, describes the theoretical positioning of the research (ISBN 978-1-905902-02-6). In this manifestation of How do we Measure the Responsibility of a Crowd, the academy, or place of learning, is considered as a site for the locus of attention spreading to the centre through the artist-speaker mediates between the practice and the audience provoking responses in the audience.