Inside the invisible cinema

So I’ve arrived in Sydney on my way to NZ and finally getting a piece together after my subtlemob experience last Thursday in London (Duncan Speakman’s Subtlemob “As If It Were The Last Time”) I see Rupert has mentioned this in an earlier blog and linked to Hannah Nicklin’s great description of the event.

At 6pm we all turned on the soundtrack, sometimes we were given instructions and sometimes we watching other people carry out instructions.  Duncan describes Subtlemob as “a piece of invisible cinema”  sometimes you are walking through a film and sometimes you are performing in that film.

When I spoke to Duncan after the event about how the idea came about he said it was about a different way of working, he’d been interested in flashmobs but wanted to make it more about the experience as opposed to a video that would end up on YouTube.

So instead of video of the event itself, here are a couple of clips of Duncan talking about it, that I shot on my new N97:

Interestingly Duncan said that the performed piece didn’t all happen how he expected, there were things that he thought might happen and loads of things that he never expected. There was one point when we were told to move quickly and change direction when people noticed us,  Duncan had expected this to be a really intense dark moment but in fact it became a game.  For me this was one of the best bits, suddenly we were laughing hysterically with complete strangers in the middle of Covent Garden

Part of the idea behind the piece was to make us aware of our surroundings – as an example, the realisation that if you smile at people in the street they don’t smile back at you. I certainly found this when I utterly failed to get one person to smile back at me.

The soundtrack worked really well on that dark wet night and I especially liked the fact that after it was over other players (strangers!) stopped to have a chat about it in the street… it definitely had the effect of connecting you to your surroundings and others around you.  I think the “invisible cinema” is a fantastic concept and highly recommend the experience.  I’m looking forward seeing what Duncan does next.