Our thesis began with questions concerning the free movement of the body in crowd situations.
How does the body move?
How is it touched?
Which are its personal boundaries?
In order to answer this, we studied the gathering of “the many” through field investigation and theoretical framing of the term “crowd”. Through the investigation we decided that the focus of our study concerns the singular body in its absolute relationship to the collective, the crowd. New questions arose.
Crowd of bodies or plain crowd?
Crowd of singularities or crowd of multiplicities?
Multitude or crowd?
The deeper we investigated the more we came to realize the meaning of the term and the challenge of representing the crowd experience. In addition to the study of the crowd experience through the study of the events, we decided to reproduce the experience through the design and realization of the Animal Party. We had already observed that there is a complete design of crowd conditions in all the events and we wanted to experiment with that through the party. We designed a different crowd condition and we executed it.
However, the weakness of the representation of the crowd experience remained since it has to do with a feeling that is translated into words or means of design with difficulty. When we wanted to communicate it with each other or to third parties we would use gestures, sounds and metaphors. In order torepresent the experience, we decided to design diagrams and create videos and soundscapes from all the events we observed (including or own) in order to come closer to the feeling of the crowd.
