the urban composition

Tonight, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall… ‘The Mauer Mob’ plan a flash-mob event/human installation along the path of the former divide.

 

Mercedes Bunz in The Guardian’s ‘The Digital Content Blog’ writes:

'... British performance artist and curator Martin Butler is using the organisational power of today's online platforms for a wall made of people, a "temporary monument of reflection". 20 years after the wall came down 33,000 people are asked to stand united for 15 minutes to form a human chain marking the path where the wall once stood. The Mauer Mob used social media such as Facebook to reach out to the people and organise the event. On their website they rearranged the volunteers along 330 different sectors where they will start the flashmob tonight at 9.15 pm.

And these are only some social media approaches among others. Indeed, it will be interesting to evaluate afterwards if it really made sense to use social media, or if it was more or less just used, because it is a trendy idea’.

 

It’s quite exciting to see artistic events like this happen with the sort of historical backdrop that Berlin provides. It’s also interesting to take a look at the work and think about how social media/the internet continues to play a part in modern cities and how people navigate them both physically and in cyberspace. Whether it’s just a ‘trendy idea’ or not I think it reflects the very contemporary way in which people engage with modern urban environments that are covered in wi-fi, 3G networks and constantly geo-tagged.