Floating Lab Collective / protest on demand

Protest On Demand
a sociopolitical performance by
The Floating Lab Collective
www.floatinglabcollective.org


Date: April 20-21
Location: Washington DC

The Floating Lab Collective will be performing Protest on Demand as part of the Multimediale Festival of Art, Politics and New Media taking place in Washington DC April 19-22. The artists will disperse into groups of four teams: Green, Blue, Orange, and Red (based on the Metro subway system colors) and will be indentifiable by their color-coded jumpsuits.

The protests are being staged in 4 locations in the DC area. Each group involves 4 artists, and each artist will accomplish a specific task, from engaging the public to documenting the protest. Each team will take requests for protests from bystanders and from the floating lab web site: www.floatinglabcollective.org This webpage is currently accessible for initiating protests for use during the performance. Each group will create placards and slogans with the protest initiator or promoter if they are present. The remote initiator or promoter will receive feedback through the Internet.

Each protest will be held for 3 minutes and it could be about anything. The content of the protests will be provided by anyone that wants to voice a concern. The webpage creates the possibility for collection of national and international concerns and points that people would like to voice in one of the most influential political locations in the world–Washington DC. The main idea is to create a platform to voice concerns from a variety of people.

The 4 groups on the street will be linked to the gallery (the floating office) through messengers, who will be collecting the documentation hourly, in the form of video, digital photo, sound recording, and the log of the project. This “floating office” will be composed of 4 artists. The “floating office” will have a printer and computers to edit. They will continually be updating the web page.

The documentation will continually be posted and displayed in the gallery, with video projectors and prints. The work will be constantly shifting and evolving during the execution of the performance, to amplify the idea of urgency, immediacy and overall importance.

###