Crowds can embody both the most positive and the most negative of forces. The first artist to have dealt with this subject is certainly Eugène Delacroix in his famous painting Freedom leading the people. This representation of the 1830 revolution showed how the crowd can be inspired by higher ideals, but also how this one, unleashed, could go so far as to strip corpses, even of their clothes…
These days at Vox, center for the contemporary image, German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer discusses the psychology of crowds and the digital models that have been invented to represent them and attempt to control them. The visitor will come out of the exhibition The Illusion of a Crowd with the feeling that we live in a world of illusions where we want to believe that technology allows us to better understand and manage the socio-political wills of citizens.
Sometimes, the sharpness of the digital images presented is revealed as a desire to believe that we have a hold on reality, that it is clearly circumscribed by our eye and our mind. Recently, demonstrations in Washington or Ottawa have clearly shown the limits of the models established by the police and governments. But what model should be used to understand the mechanics of crowds? Doesn’t the challenge lie more in the capacity of our governments to create a feeling of social justice and of more equitable living together?
To these crystalline digital images, von Wedemeyer sometimes opposes blurred, pixelated, almost illegible images, as in this video showing crowds in the 1920s, decisive years in the history of the West… We would not have understood anything, no would have learned no lesson from the rise of extremism in the first half of the 20and century. This is what this work seems to tell us…
Clemens von Wedemeyer agreed to answer our questions.
In your video mass (1998), you use images of crowds from the 1920s, and the expo’s blurb discusses ideas about the psychology of the masses by Elias Canetti, an author who saw a rampaging populace burn down the Vienna courthouse in 1927… Can we draw a parallel between the crowds of that time and those of today?
My idea was to update Canetti and investigate the differences in crowd behavior since that time. I consider mass and power (1960) as one of the works to better understand historical fascism. Even if we have to read Canetti with a critical eye, I still think that we can learn a lot from his analyses. During the events of January 6, 2021, I thought the attempted occupation of the Capitol was mostly an event created for social media. This event produced selfies, photos of violence against politicians — and so on — which embodied a struggle for images — and therefore for power — more than a real mass event to trigger a revolution… But the line is quite thin. We see with these events how social media is used to generate action.
Canetti also spoke of the behavior of crowds during epidemics. Could your artistic approach have also included demonstrations against health measures?
I’m more interested in how algorithms and applications have been developed to deal with the pandemic — tracking contacts between individuals, for example — how models and simulations of predictive behavior have been introduced into the daily, the way governments have committed themselves to preventing people from gathering in crowds, because the virus will spread there more easily. But, at the same time, the pandemic gave a gigantic boost to the entire digital economy, while the classic public space fell vacant.
It’s amazing how the behavior in society has adapted and suddenly seemed quite different. The demonstrations against the sanitary measures in Germany have revealed a strange and even frightening alliance between people on the far right and on the left, as was the case with the Querfront. [Des journalistes allemands parlent de nos jours d’un nouveau danger pour la démocratie en se référant au « Querfront », terme utilisé en Allemagne pour désigner une « alliance » d’intérêt entre les groupes d’extrême droite et ceux d’extrême gauche contre la république de Weimar dans les années 1920 et 1930].
In several of your works, including Emergency Drill Revisited (2020), the viewer will feel a parallel between, on the one hand, computer models for managing crowds by governments and, on the other hand, cinematic blockbusters and even video games. How do you explain this disturbing similarity?
In video games and post-production, CGIs [computer generated imagery] from blockbusters, algorithms and artificial intelligence are used to move “digital agents”. And similar algorithms are employed by urban planners to predict the movements of people in stadiums or public spaces. But it must also be admitted that each individual has a certain personal idea of how to behave in times of disaster, and this idea fuels both works of fiction in the cinema, video games and emergency exercises. Everyone suddenly plays a certain role.
Your work seems to represent power as a desire to control or monitor crowds and individuals rather than a desire to meet the needs of the population…
It is not a contradiction, the needs of a population are accompanied by (self) control. We are all building together a social system of which governments are a part. We are therefore not the victims of power. Moreover, to meet the needs of a population, you need a maximum of monitoring, statistics… And we see that people are not really reluctant to the idea of revealing their personal data and that they only have few problems with monitoring systems. It therefore seems to me that the population has developed a desire to become predictable, to be transparent in its actions, in order to take advantage of the comfort that companies and governments offer it in order to navigate in today’s society. Nevertheless, I want to develop a second part to my video installation Scenario Transformation (2018), in order to study modes of resistance to this dominant model.