Protest on Demand by The Floating Lab Collective

Date & Time: April 20-21, 10:00AM - 3:00PM
Location: Washington, D.C. Logan Circle, Dupont Circle, Wshington Circle, and Henley Park.
Contact: Edgar Endress, [email protected] 703.392.3946, or Bryan Leister, [email protected], 703.282.5851.

Protest on Demand: A social/political performance by The Floating Lab Collective

The Floating Lab Collective will be preforming protests on demand as part of the Multimediale Festivval of Art, Politics and New Media taking place in Washington, D.C. April 19th - 22nd. The Floating Lab Collective artists will disperse into groups of four teams: Green, Blue, Orange, and Red (based on the Metro subway system colors) and will be identifiable by their color coded jumpsuits.

Their protests are being staged in 4 locations in the D.C. 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: http://www.floatinglabcollective.org. This web page 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 feed back 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 who wishes to voice a concern. The web page 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 D.C. The main idea is to create a platform to voice concerns from a variety of people.

The 4 ggroups 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 be continually updating the web page.

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