Walking Mass (NUUM Collective)
About This Project
Walking Mass is a mass-scale participatory performance led by an instructive and narrative voice. Participants walk with individualistic intent whilst inadvertently creating a collective form. The choreography of the walk is a metaphor for the varied forms of collective decision making practiced in democracies of all shapes and sizes.
In juxtaposition of the participants’ first-person’s experience, the performance is live-streamed with an objective view, a drone camera 200 feet above ground, allowing a larger audience to view the choreography as a whole while eavesdropping on the voice. A computer vision based system is deployed to analyze the movements of participants in the drone footage and steer the progression of the instructive narrative accordingly.
“I feel that there was an exercise of power there.”
To navigate the walk, participants continually battle between their internal voice, the instructor’s/narrator’s voice and the public voice. Who do they listen to? At which point does that change?
“When you think about the mathematical definition these shapes, there’s a lot of equality”
Geometry is a study of relationships as opposed to numbers. The relationships between points, lines, shapes, – and Numbers as only something that arises from Geometry. It is concerned less with the absolute and more with the relative.
“It’s not just about what we identify with but how we assert ourselves.”
Often conversations surrounding democracy are abstract but walking or acting out our decisions make tangible our intent. In Walking Mass, participants do not verbalize their ideas but physically execute them.
“It became a kind of political and cultural differences”
The performative context provides a safe environment for participants to walk a certain path as an illustration of their feeling, standpoint, or ideal. It highlights our differences while holding our commonality – sharing a walk.
Past site-specific performances:
Walking Mass I: Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, NY (CultureHub RE-FEST 2021)
Walking Mass II: Online (CultureHub RE-FEST 2021)
Walking Mass III: Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, NY (CultureHub RE-FEST 2021)
Walking Mass ITP/IMA Graduation: Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, NY (NYU Graduation 2021)
Walking Mass IV: Freedom Square, Tallinn, Estonia (Ventspace, Estonian Academy of Arts)