Reputation of a prince - Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Crowd:
A crowd is a collection of individuals each formed, mentally and physically by their own behaviors and ideological nuances, that are temporarily bonded by a common collective motivation. Kierkegaard and Canettagree upon the equalization of individuals in the generative process of crowds. The crowd can be described as a mass that, seen from a distance, loses the figural definition of its constituent individuals and instead creates a new, unfamiliar form. It is a body that grows, shrinks, densifies and disintegrates; it is never static.
User:
The initial component of a crowd is its active user. An individual that alongside other individuals sharing a common interest are drawn to an object, space, or idea. The user constantly evaluates its mindset as it fluctuates between personal and collective motivations. The selfish emotion defines the user while the selfless emotion is what adheres the constituents and ultimately forming the crowd. The end is the object.
Audience:
The crowd emanates a sense of attraction as it demands the attention of a passerby and becomes a spectacle for those who may have been initially uninterested. The gravitational pull that attracts the curiosity and imagination of the audience forces a visual participation that anticipates a potential addition for the crowd to devour and to grow. The audience is mobilized and engaged by the force of the crowd.
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
Drone:
A new viewpoint. An instrument to spectate, comprehend in its totality and objectify the crowd as it is formed and manipulated by its surroundings and its goal. The drone’s-eye view can zoom, pan and orbit in physical space. This point of view is unable to differentiate between the individual, the audience, the crowd, and the object. What is seen through this lens is the surfacing figure of the collection of the mobilized crowd’s active and passive components and their interaction with the object. The object emerges as the indefinite focal point that becomes the physical manifestation of the voice of the crowd; an unclear, unfamiliar and seemingly inseparable monument that embodies the characteristics of the bodies that it attracts.
Crowd Magnet:
The Crowd Magnet is an architectural gesture that addresses the collective, not the individual. They are an unusual collection of fragmented monuments that are scattered throughout a city. Their blank forms reject preconceived associations and allow for the acceptance of manifold meaning, generating a series of spaces for indefinite and undictated groups of gatherers. As we are reminded by Elias Canetti that a crowd needs a collective direction and goal in order to prevail and continue to exist, the Crowd Magnets motivate and direct people to crystalize and amalgamate into larger activated bodies that demand the attention of an audience that is drawn to the immense energy of the crowd. Drones become the omnipresent eyes in the sky that can observe, evaluate and analyze, as a singular entity, the crowd’s behavior, form and direction as they interact and become one with the crowd magnets. The drone’s eye-view images render the Crowd Magnets and their relationship to the crowd they attract. The crowd is an abstracted expression of a collection of bodies in motion; a dynamic texture that transforms the crowd into a new ground for the crowd magnets.
Conquest a fortune - Image courtesy of Yasaman Fathi
The crowd magnets are speculations on the third dimension of the ambiguous artifacts from the 1970s Architettura Assassinata by Aldo Rossi. The images blur the boundaries between atmosphere, activity and form as a series of reciprocal dynamic forces that magnetically push and pull each other in order to reevaluate the deteriorating relationship between the city and its monuments.
Bellinger, Charles K. “"The Crowd Is Untruth": A Comparison of Kierkegaard and Girard.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, vol. 3, no. 1, 1996, pp. 103–119., doi:10.1353/ctn.1996.0011.
Roucek, Joseph S., and Elias Cannetti. “Crowds and Power.” American Sociological Review, vol. 31, no. 3, 1966, p. 420., doi:10.2307/2090835.
Yasamin Fathi was born in 1990 in Ahvaz, Iran. She graduated from the Art and Architecture faculty of the Islamic Azad University of Shiraz. She continued her post-graduate studies at the Southern California Institution of Architecture where she completed her M.Arch II in 2017.
Her experimental work explores the relationship between imageries, texture and form and their intersection with the theory of affordance. Her thesis at SCI-Arc focused on the architecture of the crowd and its monumentality. She produces imageries that are flat combinations of background (environment), middle ground (form), foreground (crowd) and texture.
