Be a model for a day

Imagine going to Bryant Park during NY Fall Fashion Week, and getting treated to a fashion show not inside the actual fashion week, but outside the tent. Jack Spade decided to do a show in Sept. 2007 behind the tent in Bryant Park, amongst tons of people drinking coffee, doing yoga, sleeping, walking by, and who knows what else. Armed with a boombox, a rack of clothing, and a video camera the Jack Spade team put on a fashion show using passerbys as their models to walk up and down the runway. Enjoy!

Flash Mobs

When looking for examples of spectacles, someone came up with the group improv everywhere. Although they are quite a spectacle, I think they are even more a derive. And improv everywhere may be the most famous of the flash mobs right now but there are groups like them all over the world. Groups like these prepare song and dance numbers or just something out of the ordinary and perform in public places. People going about their everyday errands and tasks may just have their day brightened. It's a little something out of the ordinary that makes your everyday more exciting :)

http://www.breakoutinsong.com/

http://improveverywhere.com/

http://pdximprov.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k

A Different Kind of Drive

You like driving, right? But it's boring. You just drive and drive, and nothing changes. Well, not anymore:

Thank goodness for Japan, making the world more interesting.

IKEA Cats

IKEA UK let loose a bunch of cats in an IKEA store and let them interact with the store furniture however they wanted. It fulfills the requirements to be a dérive, a journey through an environment while interest in specific aspects of the environment guide you. However, the difference with this case is that the drifters are cats.

I like that animals can participate in art too. It helps that cats are so independent, you know the saying, curiosity killed the cat.

Richard Ankrom

Richard Ankrom is an artist whose work deals with making highways signs. While living in L.A., Ankrom became fed up with the dangerous and unorganized freeway system. He started to create and hang highway signs designed to help drivers safely navigate the freeway. This is unusual and perhaps contrary to De Bord's plan for the derive, because Ankrom was creating art to help people better navigate within the already created pathways. However, once the city learned about the sign (it took them 9 months to figure out that his art was on the highway since it looked so realistic), they had it removed. It seems that signs that helped clarify and make freeways safer were actually against the goals of the city, which is what motivated me to post about Ankrom in the context of this assignment.

Ankrom refers to his work as guerrilla public service. His art works within and against the system at the same time. His website and this article will give you more information about his work.

Neg's Urban Sports

Based out of England, this guy Neg comes up with what he calls Urban Sports. Basically, he goes around England messing with people and making them angry in most situations, but it is also an interesting look into what makes people mad and how they deal with it. In his sport "My Ball" he goes around and takes the ball that people are playin with and sees how long he can keep it away from them and in "Knock and don't run" he knocks on people's doors and pretends he's answering his own door. Overall it's hilarious and interesting to watch how people handle this completely annoying stranger.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoxcZiWK79c

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZod6oPurWI

BodyCartography Project

Minneapolis based BodyCartography Project are invested in exploring the body in sensorial engagement with its own internal world and its interface with the external world. In "GO", Olive Bieringa encounters urban space in intimate and unusual manners. There are a couple of videos, the first from Minneapolis in 2006, and the second from Brooklyn in the same year. Both are great. The Brooklyn piece is longer, but there is an interesting run-in with the police, and an omnipresent laughter from a woman who appears to have been following the piece. She even gives a bit or two of commentary.

Notice in one of the quotes about the work the explicit use of the term dérive.


http://www.bodycartography.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=430:go&catid=39:archive&Itemid=113