“If you’re near Federal Hill [in Baltimore] on Sunday afternoon, and 200 people simultaneously drop to their knees and begin crawling on the ground, you might think that you’re witnessing a mass, public-spirited search for a lost contact lens.

“You’d be completely wrong, but also kind of right. Public Moves Federal Hill has nothing to do with locating a tinted disc roughly the size of a fingernail. But the community art project has everything to do with seeing the world from a sharper, more focused point of view.

“‘Hopefully, this will encourage both the people participating and accidental observers to open their senses to what’s happening around us,’ says Joshua Bisset, 34, who is organizing the event with his wife, Laura Quattrocchi.

“‘That’s really one of the purposes of art. If I’m in a gallery looking at a painting, and then go outside, I’m flooded with details about my surroundings that I hadn’t noticed before. If people see this work, and a day later, see a kid scrambling down Federal Hill, they might look at it in a new way. One of our goals is to show how everyday movement is inherently aesthetic and can be transformed into art.'”

via Baltimore Sun
Public Moves Federal Hill
Shua Group

Compare Shua’s intervention to Francis Alys’ When Faith Moves Mountains (2002).

“On April 11, 2002, five hundred volunteers were supplied with shovels and asked to form a single line at the foot of a giant sand dune in Ventanilla, an area outside Lima. This human comb pushed a certain quantity of sand a certain distance, thereby moving a sixteen-hundred-foot-long sand dune about four inches from its original position.”

via Artforum

It also reminds me of one of my favorite public performances, Frozen Grand Central by Improv Everywhere.