Off Center

I asked a few people yesterday if they were attending the flashmob outside the Walker, and the response was a pretty universal “People are still doing those?”. Yes, Yes they are. For those that don’t know what a Flashmob is, Wikipedia helps out:

…a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via social mediaor viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt.

The call for this flashmob went out on craigslist and was spreading around Twitter and Facebook. The instructions were simple:

The general idea, for all of those who don’t know, is to dance for 3 minutes to your iPod/MP3 but no music is allowed to be played out loud (just in your headphones). 
The point of this is that it has no point. Total pointless, random fun! 

At 8:00 PM on the dot neon colored poster board will be held up-that is your queue to start your tunes and start dancing for the cars driving by. You must silently dance to your iPod. Simple! 
At the end of 3 mins the signs will go up again, this is when we all calmly walk away from our “dance floor.” 

There were about 50 people at the event. Most in the crowd seemed to be around high school or college aged, making me feel old. Most people had iPod earbuds in during the dancing, so there was not much interaction between participants, unlike the pillow fight, but everyone was smiling. As total pointless, random fun, it did the job. 

Waitingline also posted a video:

I saw about ten other people there taking pictures last night and talked to a few of them. If anyone has photos, adding them to the Walker Art Center flickr group would be swell.