On a sunny Wednesday evening in August, 38 people gathered on Hanover Quay beside the Grand Canal basin in Dublin’s Docklands, equipped with their digital cameras, DSLRs and smart phones. Outside Facebook’s Irish headquarters they spent 5 minutes photographing at will, capturing 780 photos and 19 minutes of video footage.
This was Uncommon Land’s third photographic flash mob, an artistic intervention aimed at exposing the strange phenomenon of ‘private’ streets in Dublin where photography is restricted.
Hanover Quay is part of a larger area owned by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA), a State-created body that operates as a private company. Following reports that Facebook security staff had been stopping people from taking photographs on the street outside the building, we decided that this would be an ideal location for our next flash mob. The reason the Facebook staff have been giving for restricting photography is that the street is privately owned.
Flash mob participants played a game of ‘photo tag’ – this involved remembering and ‘tagging’ various different people on cue by photographing them. This turned out to be a more complicated than it first appeared! After 5 minutes, the flash mob dispersed and the normal flow of the area resumed.
Hanover Quay is more than 200 years old and has a rich history as part of a busy port. In the 1990s, it was handed over to the DDDA as part of their regeneration scheme for the area. Along with new offices, restaurants and apartments came the ubiquitous presence of high-vis jacketed security staff who enforce the economically-driven rules and ethos of the DDDA.
The photographs have bee geo-tagged and uploaded to Panaramio and Google Maps, creating a photo cluster of this tightly controlled area of the city. The video footage has been edited, creating a piece that documents the event. This video and the photographs form part of an installation at HACK THE CITY, an exhibition at Dublin’s Science Gallery, which runs until September 8th.
Uncommon Land 