social fiction | psychogeography

 

Report on Crowd Psychogeography experiment 25 January 2003

At 16.30, 9 people gathered at the rendezvous point to partake in an experiment that was devised to clarify our understanding of how people flow through the Hoog Catharijne shopping centre /  barricade between the Train station & the centre of Utrecht.
The most important motivation behind this experiment, as the name already suggests, was to determine how a crowd (or a lack thereof) influences your appreciation of the place your are in. The method used was to follow people through HC, looking like a member of the crowd but in reality hiding inside it to research the behaviour of a crowd.

If psychogeography is about breaking the habits in the use of public space the act of following people is good way to achieve this: it does give a certain edge, or a certain swing, to your perception of a place because you are focusing on other things than normal, while the pace & the particularities of manoeuvring through the crowd differ from your own.

Following people does mean invading someone's private space, even if you are 20 meters behind that person. In a crowd nobody suspects to be followed, this discovery of the nakedness of the individual within the crowd does makes you  become aware that you are followed at any given time by hundreds of security camera's. When over the loudspeakers the announcement was made to the public to be aware of pickpockets it individually occurred to different people in our group that they might as well were warning the public against us.

The experiment took place at 16.30 because at 17.00 the shops close & it doesn't take much time after that for HC to become a less busy. Around 17.30 some wings are by then already totally vacant & as I found out, the junks were already busy buying & shooting up their brown.  

When it's crowded it very easy to follow people. I walked next to somebody for more then 10 minutes, they did notice me of course, but the flow of people through the lanes is regulated in such a way that everybody heads into the same direction any time. There are many ways to enter & leave HC, but only a small numbers are used as was proven again by this experiment. When from about 17.30 the place is getting empty following people quickly gets much more complicated. HC has got the reputation of being unsafe & you just notice that people are more alert. They invariably keep their pace high & do tend to be cautious when people are coming to close.

In our discussion afterwards it turned out that most of us were during the experiment mostly preoccupied with staying on the track of the people they were following; it can be actually hard work that demands all your attention. An observation that should be included here is that even though it can be difficult to follow people who are in a rush, it's impossible to follow people who walk in turtle mode. Walking that slow is such unnatural behaviour that nobody could maintain it for longer than a minute.

In the announcement people were offered the possibility of doing this experiment while being drunk. Nobody tried this & perhaps for the better because it's forbidden to drink while in (or outside) HC. Or to be more precise the law forbids carrying with you any opened storage devices that contain alcoholic beverages. Anti-psychogeographic legislation will be coming to your neighbourhood soon too.

 

pics by Titus