Crowd Psychology

Speaking of the hive mentality, the Wooster Collective has been documenting different examples of how choreographed large crowds shot from above are used in street-oriented advertising, such as pitches from a broadband company, beverage giant Coca Cola, Eastern European conglomerate Akbank, and the 1989 British Airways commercial that perhaps started it all. There is also the "Mad World" music video, inserted above, from Michael Gondry and music by Michael Andrews to add to this anthology.

Of course, these crowds are often created digitally, as was this ad from the SIGGRAPH electronic theater for Carleton Beer. Bruno Latour has included several reflections about representations of large crowds in his volume Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (the mass games of North Korea, photographs of parliaments and scientific congresses, etc.). Learning about the technical constraints on representing these forms of assemby in virtual space at SIGGRAPH, if the agents must appear to behave more autonomously, was interesting in light of the issues that Latour raises.