Consensual Navigation Shirt (2010)

Modified thrift store shirts. Timed performance.

Strangers on the street wear a shirt made for five people and attempt to move through the city together. Group decision making and consensus becomes essential. Everyday antisocial activity like cellphone use is suddenly very difficult. Conversations result.

Urban inhabitants learn how to navigate the city with a invisible solitary bubble around them. Decisions are made continuously about how to move through and around people, how to queue in lines, how to get where one wants to go faster. These navigations are usually without spoken communication, without eye contact, without empathy. This project upends these habits in participants and allows them to navigate and discover their own city in a different way.

Of course, in these experiments in New York City, the sight of five people attached to each other twisting down the sidewalk did not attract the slightest notice.

Part of Seth Carnes’ Test Dérive project.

Shown as part of Conflux Festival, New York, NY.

Eric Forman Studio