What's More with Many

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Although initially still, sections of the crowd are animated whenever the cursor passes over them. The person in the back, a woman, starts applauding; then the person in front, a man, gets up and starts emphatically pumping his arm. Now it is the viewer who is also animated. The more he moves the mouse on the stand, or the hand on the touch screen, the more he makes the individual patterns react, one after the other, creating a movement in the crowd that follows the trajectory of his gesture. The viewer produces a sort of ‘wave’ or, depending on one’s interpretation, a collective and orderly salute.
At first, the playful discovery of the process prompts the gestures of the spectator and leads him to coordinate them so that the animation of the crowd obeys a regular pattern. Very quickly, though, these same gestures acquire substance, a meaning that implicates him. The ambivalence of the crowd’s movement, dependent as it is on our gestures, incites us to action at the same time that it makes us question the drives–not always easy to resist–that invest a collective situation.

Credits:

Programming: Emmanuel Méhois (web) and Oussama Mubarak (installation)
To access the online work (desktop computer only): https://dautan.dispotheque.org