Planking Not Pranking thesis [text version] by Venus Chung

MAJOR CONTEXT PROJECT

NAME: WAI YEE ( VENUS ) CHUNG

CID No.: 337

EMAIL: w.chung10@csm.arts.ac.uk

TUTOR: Robert Hanks

Title: Planking,

not Pranking –

Exploring the mythology of lying down in the urban space

Abstract In this paper, I will explore the potential mythologies of planking, lying down and face hidden in urban spaces. The action creates a strong visual outcome in photos. People from different countries with a wide range of ages follow the practice. The unexpected composition of humans, objects and surrounds involves creativity. My curiosity has driven me to investigate the activity of planking and the humanity associated with it by gathering information and related theories to decode the myth.

Content

3 – Introduction Chp 1 Project the Self 4 – Emergence 5 – Exploration 8 – Unconscious Dream 9 – Event Horizon 10 – Panoptic Vision

Chp 2 Perform the City 12 – Visual Trace 13 – Body Talks 15 – Bodies in Urban Spaces 16 – Planking not Pranking 18 – Flashmob

Chp 3 Critique of the Urban Life 20 – Psychogeography 21 – Walk in Line 22 – Wanderlust

23 – Just 24 – Fight for Space

27 – Conclusion 28 – Bibliography 31 – Figure of Illustration 32 – Appendix

Introduction

Planking came into public interest in late 2010. The simple action of the game -‐ lying down, face hidden, hands at your side, foots pointed -‐ in familiar environments, can be conducted by everyone, from a baby to the elderly, regardless of gender. What makes planking strange is people lying on a surface in an environment not intended for planking. What also makes planking interesting is when we see people lying high up above the ground on objects that we do not expect. Planking is a personal activity conducted by a small group of people, being concerned with the micro-‐space in speciFic locations at a particular time, yet is also a globally dispersed practice. Planking photos uploaded by worldwide practitioners circulate among social networking sites on the Internet. The activity is very visual and performative. Planking addresses the human body in urban spaces. It does not give any particular statement, but it presents implicit enunciation and meaning. It has room for creativity and production of desires. It produces space, time and social being. Therefore, based on the marginal position of planking, this spatial practice enables us to study the humanity associated in urban space in our daily life. To explore the mystery of planking, we would investigate the subject from interdisciplinary methodologies, through the connection of different area of theories. I would cover brieFly the area that humanity would associate with the urban space, and bring it back to the explanation of planking through the studies of spatial practice to explain the subject in depth. The planking photos together with artwork in public space are used as the main evidence to support this paper.

In Chapter 1 “Project the Self”, I will brieFly introduce the emergence of planking and then show what planking practitioners would associate with when lying high up above the ground. After giving a general knowledge of the activity, Chapter 2 “Perform the City” is predominantly social in focus. We shall deal with the relationship between the body and space. In Chapter 3, “Critique of the Urban Life” decodes the implicit enunciation of the activity in urban space. There is not much publication and study about planking as it does not have a long history. The combination of body and public performance together with academic theories results in an interesting journey to explore the subject in depth.

Chp1 Projecting the Self

Emergence

Planking, also named as the lying down game or facedown, a new Flash-‐mob, spreads via the Internet. It is an activity that consists of lying face down in an unusual or incongruous location. Both hands must touch the sides of the body, and having a photograph of the participant taken and posted on the Internet is an integral part of the game. The boldness of lying down participants is judged based on three categories: Firstly, the public nature of the spot, followed by the creativity of the background, and lastly the number of people involved. The more the better – both in terms of participants and observers. The game was invented by Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon in 1997 and became popular in northeast Australia in 2006, then in Britain by the summer of 2009, reaching the point by late 2010. The term "Planking" was coined in Gladstone around 2008 in Queensland, Australia. It became a fad in 2011. Planking came into media spotlight when an Australian boy was found dead after planking. It was reported that he was drunk, and then fell down from the seven-‐ storey balcony after planking. His fatal plank triggered heated debates across the Internet on whether planking should be banned in schools. Some people argue that Tom Green invented planking in 1994. The Canadian comedian referred to the video as “Dead Guy”. His motivation was doing a random, ridiculous thing and made a social comment with it. He was lying on Ottawa sidewalk motionless, testing if passersby would stop and give a hand on the street. 4

! Figure 1. Tom Green planking in 1994.

Planking led to its derivatives coming into notice, such as levitation1, horsemanning2, owling3 and coning4, etc. There are large groups of people who believe planking produces nothing meaningful. They regard planking practitioners as people lying down on a dusty surface for fun. Yet there is a growing number of people uploading their own planking photos at various locations, together with different objects which are usually out of our expectation.

1 Natasumi Hayashi, a Japanese photographer, shoots portraits of herself, levitating across all

sorts of places including train stations, alleyways and roads. 2 Horsemanning requires two individuals, one situated with one's head hidden (i.e., tilted

backwards) with the other hiding his body and exposing only his head. The resulting photo appears to show a headless body with a disembodied head lying beside it. 3 People squat like an owl. 4 To buy an ice cream cone through a drive-‐through, and grabbing it by the ice cream itself not

the cone.

! Figure 2. Planking by Gordon Ramsay, a British chef and host of reality show.

Exploration

To better understand planking, I tried the activity in my school. I laid on a newly decertiFied printer, and a girder next to the computer staff room. Lying on the object and in a place I usually pass by, I did it with thrill. I did not dare to open my eyes widely for fear of how people would view me; for fear that I would see myself falling down, and damaging the items below me. When I looked around whilst on the girder, the sudden realization of being on an elevated surface gave me unexplainable pleasure. The basic action of planking merely requires the practitioner to lie down in public. I found the higher I go, the greater satisfaction it brought.

! Figure 3. Planking on a printer in CSM.

! Figure 4. Planking on a girder in CSM

Due to the height difference, being at an elevated position allows people to see things from a different angle. When we are at a higher place, the objects below are scaled down. It provides a different way of seeing and makes one feel psychologically empowered. This can be explained through the Film Dead Poet Society (1989), which starred Robin Williams. He was a poet teacher, called “Captain”. There were two scenes in which students were standing on the desks.

Half way through the Film, Captain asked the boys to stand up on the teaching table, looking around the classroom. Everyone was shocked but followed what the teacher instructed. Captain said, “We must constantly look at things in different ways”. At the end of the Film, Captain was packing his belonging leaving the school as he was linked to the death of a student. To show their support to Captain, the boys all gradually stood on their desks, while forcing to get off by the principle during the poetry class.

! Figure 5. Last scene in Dead Poet Society.

Being on top of a surface that we rarely think about in the familiar surrounding provides a privileged feeling. Through the actions out of our routine life, we implicitly give statement opposite to the existing rules. We are like sudden heroes, even just in a temporary moment. In planking, at First we break the regular rules with uncertainty when lying on objects above the ground. After we reach the goal, and gain a different vision, the unconscious pleasure overrode the panic. Beauty is a sudden awareness of otherness within the familiar unfolding of space in time.5

Unconscious Dream

Humans are interested to go to higher places in a controllable manner to experience the potential danger of falling and its instant excitement. Being exclusive on high places, observing downward, brings huge pleasure. Man On Wire

5 Quote from John Stezaker, a British collage artist, known for his situation work of human

portrait and landscape in postcard and Film. Mark Coetzee, John Stezaker, Rubell Family Collection, (New York: RFC, 2007), p.37

(2001) is a documentary of Philippe Petit, a French man challenged to walk on the wire, crossing the world’s tallest building at the time in 1974, the towers of World Trade Centre in New York, without any physical protection.

! Figure 6. Philippe Petit walked cross the World Trade Centre towers.

In the beginning of the documentary, Petit stated that “Usually when you have your dream, the object of your dream is tangible; is there to confront yet. The object of my dream was not even existing yet!” This refers to an incident in his youth, when he First saw a page in newspaper reporting the establishment of the Eiffel Tower; he could not help but to tear off the page from the magazine belonging to a clinic. He could no longer carry on living without having at least tried to conquer the towers. Being on top gave him a special feeling. “I see down on the wire, while I cross that I did something amazed people. I look all the way down to look at something. I will never in my life see again. I can tell you a lie, but to see it is probably not.” The difFiculties and risks of planking are far below walking on a wire. However, there are some similarities worth noticing. Both of the behaviours, lying down in public space, and walking on a wire across skyscrapers, are body-‐centric movements, activities out of the ordinary life. They use the body to project the inner self. Both the actions are very visual, captured by photos and video in a temporary moment. They create space through the body, the experience of height difference from planking practitioners and Petit are very unique. The signiFicant difference is that everyone can do planking without years of training and preparation like walking on a wire. In a written interview with an active planking

practitioner on the Facebook discussion group, Jordan Mann, a high school boy from America referred to planking as “a mild spot”. (See appendix) Thus, owning to the simple action, planking allows more people in a situation to temporarily escape in the banality of everyday life.

Event Horizon

With the focus on height difference, we can refer to the work of Antony Gormley, a British sculptor and Turner’s price winner. He has worked on a series of human-‐ themed project, especially known for “Event Horizon”.

! Figure 7. Event Horizon, sculpture by Antony Gormley.

“Event Horizon”, 31 life-‐size human Figure sculptures cast from the artist’ body were put onto rooftops of buildings across central London. The Hayward Gallery is the vantage point for the works. The project addresses the skyline through the position of human-‐like sculptures, in order to encourage people to look around. Some of the works were clearly visible while some were sensed only as presences on the horizon. The artist revealed in an interview with BBC, “It was designed to make people feel slightly uncertain about what was going on in the world they lived in. The idea was to show how to introduce these life-‐sized Figures into the topography of London as if it were a natural landscape, as if it were mountains against the sky” Art critic Adrian Searle noted, “The Figures seemed an intelligent species occupying our city. Many people appear so oblivious to their surroundings…

Isolation and insulation are among the leitmotifs of Gormley's sculpture. However much they appear as watchers on the skyline.” (Searie 2007, Guardian). Gormley’ aim is to evoke against-‐groundedness leading people to imagine freedom up high. Searie described that when people spotted the Figures, they might situate to the sculptures for a moment forgetting their groundedness, joining the Figures above. The presences of the human-‐Figure sculptures on high places drew citizens to look upon the building, the skyline, and then to imagine. The lying down action often concerns with high places in an unusual location. Looking and Finding a place for planking reassess one’s own position in the world and becomes aware of one’s status of embedment.

Panoptic Vision

Planking attracts many people globally, predominantly in Australia and the United Kingdom with a wide range of ages. People are unconscious why these practitioners go planking, or think that there is not a special reason to plank. One thing is for sure that it allows the practitioners to see differently. Being an exclusive few lying up high to look downward is as if we are gaining the power of God. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau, a French anthropologist and philosopher whose works are about humans’ unconscious practice in everyday life, developed an understanding of place and space connected to linguistic practice. After he visited to the top of the World Trade Centre, the panoptic vision (the ability of “seeing a whole”) makes the complexity of a city become more transparent and readable. “One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets…nor is it possessed. The elevation transFigures a person into a voyeur. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar eye, looking down like a god ... The Fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more.” (de Certeau 1998:92-‐93) The desire to see the city dates back to Medieval and Renaissance painters who represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. From one

single point of view, the painter could illustrate everything from the foreground to the distant background. De Certeau regarded the perspective drawing as omniscient eye. The understanding of the unknown to known allows the spectator into a celestial eye. The spectator situated himself/herself as god. Situating in higher place provides a panoptic view to see the ambiance more realistically, as if we are reading the map from top, more detail can be captured. “Escaping the totalization produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.” (de Certeau 1998:93) The lying down action allows practitioners to escape from the routine life. With the level change, people can imagine and situate. The otherness in seeing provokes the inner self.

Chp 2 Performing the City

Visual Trace Planking is a temporary action in a public space, so the record relies on photos. Disregarding the photographic quality of the lying down pictures among the Internet, the overall style of pictures can be categorized as tableau-‐vivant photography, in which pictorial narrative concentrating into a single image. It has a story telling quality of creating psychological drama as the model’s face is

obscured. Tableau-‐vivant photography possesses internally ambiguity. The pictures encourage storytelling in the viewer’s mind. The main motive of planking photos is to document the temporality of the action, while the narrative for pictures are not put into much consideration. When we look into the narrative aspect of the photos, the storytelling gives an intense (the background and the composition of the image) and ambiguous drama (as the planking practitioners are face hidden), based on the thought of viewers. Two roles of the image should be considered. The photos use wide angles to emphasise location, also the human body is often at the centre of the composition. Clearly, the photos are not limited to only documenting the moment. They have inFluential power in encouraging people to follow the action. We found the photos interesting because the planking practitioners are motionless, lying down in places. We would not consider the action strange if it happens on the beach when adults are sunbathing or a baby lying down, crawling on the ground. We would be less surprised if it is in the fringe festival.

Figure 7. Street Performance in Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2011

The speciality of planking is people lying in a familiar public space, which is not intended for the purpose of planking. For example, a library is for information storage and exchange; a factory is for goods production. In this context, we can see that planking emphasises on the relationship of human body and urban space.

! Figure 8. Wai Yee Chung planking in CSM library

Body Talks

Planking is highly performative. Practitioners can conduct it outdoor, so people in the street can witness the moment. When it is performed indoor, such as home and ofFice, the moment is framed in photos so other people outside the group and organization can view it through the circulation of these photos on the Internet. Although people are lying down motionless in public, the activity has the “speech of the act” to read an already produced space. For example a “room” in an apartment, the “corner” of the street, a shopping “centre”, a public “place”. These terms of everyday discourse distinguish but do not isolate particular spaces. In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre, a French sociologist and philosopher wrote that through spatial practice, the complexity of a city in our daily life is readable, both the mental space (space of our thinking) and real place (physical

sphere in which we live). The practitioners follow the same gesture, lying down still, as a thread to link all the individuals. “A spatial practice must have a certain cohesiveness, but this does not imply that it is coherent (in the sense of intellectually worked out or logically conceived.)” (Lefebvre 1991:38) Body Talks (2011), an art project in Maastricht, Netherlands, with 19 street projections and 4 spatial video installations in public space, investigated how to evoke unexpected interpretations of bodily expression or body language through the disciplines of video art and short dance Films. The videos are shows on the windows of the streets. The project coordinator, Bart van den Boom described that “The street is where everyone is aware of their own bodily presence and where they are alert to the non-‐verbal signals from others. Body Talks is a study into artists and performers making silent yet pervasive ‘utterances’ about themes such as human relationships, political-‐social topicalities and the search for an individual identity in today’s image culture.” (Body Talks Catalogue 2011) The video projections visualise how body can be a linguistic aid and how non-‐ verbal communication can become choreography. Thanks to their speciFic content, they can easily be shown in the urban landscape. In the public spaces, they enter into a direct one-‐on-‐one relationship with the onlooker or passerby in the street.

Bodies in Urban Space

We can consider that planking is very social. It has potentially unlimited audience while it does not explicitly give any particular statement. Although planking seems a random action, it draws the connection between humans and the city. “Bodies in Urban Space” is a worldwide project by choreographer Willi Dorner. It was a part of French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival in Aug 2010 in New York and performed around the Thames in London in 2008. Dorner stated the aim of the objective on his personal website,

“Bodies in Urban Spaces is a temporarily intervention in diversiFied urban architectonical environment. The intention of Bodies in Urban Spaces is to point out the urban functional structure and to uncover the restricted movement possibilities and behaviour as well as rules and limitations. By placing the bodies in selected spots the interventions provoke a thinking process and produce irritation. Passersby, residents and audience are motivated and prompted to reFlect their urban surrounding and their own movement behaviour and habits. Bodies in urban spaces invites the residents to walk their own city thus establishing a stronger relationship to their neighbourhood, district and town. The interventions are temporarily without leaving any traces behind, but imprints in the eye-‐witnesses’ memory.” The bodies are as human sculptures exhibiting in the outdoor museum, the city. It draws us to reFlect on our surroundings, to our own life. Planking takes the same concept of Bodies in Urban Space. Citizens of various roles in daily life replace the trained performers to explore the city. The photos frame the moments.

! Figure 9. Bodies in Urban Spaces in New York

Planking not Pranking

Without knowing much about planking, people often charge the activity as pointless. Two planking practitioners in Taiwan hope to alter this misconception. They treat planking seriously as a means to promote Taiwan’s tourism. They have almost 100,000 followers in Facebook. The duo are labeled as PK girls. PK is the abbreviation of “Pui Kai”, the Cantonese curse of falling down on the street, which is as derogatory as “may you drop dead”. Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, an online social networking and micro-‐blogging service provider, has invited them as VIPs on the tightly controlled social network to promote their activities across the strait. Despite the negative meaning of “Pui Kai”, PK girls hope to infuse the word and planking with new meaning, and bring positive social message through lying down in the city, both at signature tourist spots as well as marginal places. They upload the photos to the Facebook group, adding captions to give the background of the locations.

Figure 10. PK girls in front of the National Chiang Kai-she Memorial Hall in Taipei

Figure 11. PK girls in Sanshui St. Market in Taipei

The elderly would give them strange looks, while the youth would walked up to the pair to ask to take photos with them. The girls emphasized three golden rules in planking: “We don’t disturb people. We don’t do things to harm ourselves and we don’t damage public property.” (News report on Dailymail May 2011) Planking does not produce an object as commodity but it produces social experience. It allows the practitioners and the observers to exchange messages. The two girls convey their promotional concept, while the Internet users leave comments on their Facebook group. Despite the copying it may involve, planking practitioners will Find the image created very unique because the experience gained in lying down process is personal. The activity encourages creativity, with unlimited possibility to compose the image with people, objects and places. This allows people to reFlect on the relationship between humans and the ambiance. It raises questions about the use of space and the ideology in the modern world, which would be discussed in next chapter.

Flashmob Planking is much related to Flashmob. It is an activity where groups of people, who assemble suddenly in public, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, artistic expression. A Flashmob is organized via telecommunications. Planking and Flashmob are both collective behaviours with the aid of the Internet to disseminate new movements globally. The duration of the action is very short for each practice. Despite the general belittling to the nature of the activities, in fact, it can be a powerful tool for public communication. It can be handled productively in terms of economical production. We can look at a commercial campaign in Antwerpen Central railway station in 2009. A staged performance advertising a talent show, Op zoek naar Maria (Looking for Maria), featuring over 200 participants dancing, seemingly spontaneously to “Do-‐Re-‐Mi”, has received over 20,000,000 hits on Youtube, a video-‐sharing platform on the Internet. Op zoek naar Maria is a reality talent competition program aired in Belgium, about the search for an actress to play the lead role in a stage revival of The Sound of Music initiated by an English musical theatre composer, Andrew

Lloyd Webber. Through the concept of Flashmob, the production team launched an unexpected performance in train station to raise publicity.

! Figure 12. Sound of music in Antwerpen Central Station

Back to planking, I believe that it is derived from Flashmob. The action of lying down on places can be done privately, but through the planking photos or its videos the concept can be spread drastically, inducing more people to look around their surroundings. It produces a sudden social experience that everyone is noticeable because of the uniqueness of action. It is like a practice of public art, everyone in the city is the performer. Nick Kaye, author of Site SpeciNic Art–Performance, Place and Documentation has proposed that site is a performed place, within an ethnographic perspective. “Considering strategies which variously occupy urban and rural locations, which utilise found and constructed environments, as well as those occurring in conventional galleries and theatres, site –speciFic practices are identiFied, with a working over of the production, deFinition and performance of ‘place’.” (Kaye 2000: 3)

Chp 3 Critique of the Urban Life

Psychogeography

Planking is inseparable with another spatial practice -‐ walking. In order to look for a better place to create stunning images, practitioners would walk around to explore the community. “Walking is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different.” (de Certeau 1988:107) Psychogeography is a study of the speciFic effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of

individuals. The planking participants are like psychogeographers, individuals who explore and report on psychogeographical phenomena to read the city. This concept was First used in 1950s in Paris and the Lettrist Group, a forerunner of the Situationist International6, whose leading Figure was philosopher Guy Debord. It was a tool in an attempt to transform urban life, First for aesthetic purposes, but later for increasingly political ends. Iain Sinclair, a contemporary psychogeographer, does not try to transform the urban life, but through walking and documenting, as moving observers to read the urban text. In Lights Out For The Territories, Sinclair walked across nine routes across the territories of London, connecting people and places, redrawing boundaries both ancient and modern, reading obscure signs and Findings hidden patterns. “Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the Fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself…It’s never the result that matters; it’s the time spent on the process, the discipline of repetition. Enlightened boredom.” (Sinclair 1998:4-‐5)

Walking The Line

Richard Long, a British sculptor and land artist has been testing the boundaries of art since late 1960s with walks by texts, photos and works of his sculptures in the landscape. The intellectual beauty of walking a straight line across a landscape has inspired him to make constructed walks through a variety of topographies and climates in locations. In Walking a Line (1967), Long took a straight line running across a grass Field: the result of repeating his steps. He then photographed the work, which took its place temporarily in nature. The subject is the interaction of man and nature, the landscape. In the essay The Intricacy of the Skin, The Complexity of The Web— Richard Long’s Art, art critics Paul Moorhouse noted that the principle of making a work of art about the meeting of man and nature by leaving a sign of that interaction is encapsulated in Walking a Line and in Long’s subsequent development of that approach. 6 A restricted

group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general strike of May 1968 in France.theoretical work peaked with the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. 21

Walking is a fundamental, universal activity, the basis of locomotion through the world for human beings. Though its principal function is movement, people do not only walk to get from one place to another. Walking is a way of engaging and interacting with the world, providing the means of exposing oneself to new, changing perceptions and experiences and of acquiring an expanded awareness of our surroundings. Through such experience, and through a deeper understanding of the places we occupy, we acquire a better understanding of our own position in the world. It is a visual activity. Every walk enables us to see and to think over sights, to assimilate the new into the known. By combining walking and lying down above the ground, participants receive both vertical and horizontal vision and experience. The spatial practices cannot be solely reduced to their graphic trail. Different with Long’s practice, planking is often conducted and reported in the urban space. It reFlects that our living environment is built in man’s constructed spaces.

Wanderlust

The resting gesture in planking, doing nothing productive in the public, implicitly questions the pace of our life and the use of space under capitalism. Under industrialisation, humans’ lifestyle has changed drastically. “Industrialization characterizes modern society. Industrialization provides the point of departure for reflection upon our time.” (Lefebvre 1996:65) In the modernised cities, we are less free to go wherever we want. Every route is designated. Pavements direct pedestrians’ way of movement. Transport vehicles replace the feet. Our life has sped up. The entertainment in a bus, train or Flight is replaced by reading a book or watching movies on a screen, instead of the engagement with the environment. We now see fewer things in physical space, but more and more through the screen to go into the virtual world. People nowadays live in a series of interiors, for instance, home, car, gym, ofFice, shops, etc. They are

disconnected from each other. The multiplication of technologies in the name of efFiciency is eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production economically, and minimize unstructured travel time in between. Rebecca Solnit in Wanderlust: A History of Walking mentioned, “The rhetoric of efFiciency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantiFied cannot be valued that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular. Woolgathering, cloud-‐ gazing, wandering, window shopping, are nothing but voids to be Filled by something more deFinite, more productive or faster paced. I like walking because it is slow…The modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.” (Solnit 2001:10-‐11)

Street Space

Just (1995), a music video of Radiohead, a British alternative rock band, depicts scenes of lying down in the street, like the strangeness of planking irritates the public to question, to think and to imagine. In the video, a middle-‐age man lies down in the middle of the pavement outside of an apartment building. People start to gather, thinking that something must be wrong with the man, and the band is shown looking out the window at the events below. A heated conversation between the man and the crowd develops, as the people start demanding to know what the man is doing and why he is lying there. In subtitles, the man Finally gives in and says, “Yes I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you why I’m lying here... but God forgives me... and God helps us all... because you don't know what you ask of me.” The camera zooms in on his mouth as the man Finally gives the answer, but the subtitles have suddenly stopped, so the reason is not revealed to the viewer. As the camera zooms back out, it shows the pavement covered with the crowd of people, all lying down just like the man. The speciFic words of the man said have yet to be revealed.

Figure 13. Lying down scene in Just.

The suspense of the video and strangeness of planking implicitly challenge bureaucracy. It critiques the use of social space but not wealth in urban planning. It visualizes time other than the quantity parameter we measured. It creates space for own pleasure and social exchange. Space is a site in which social relations took place. Space and the political organization of space express social relationships but also react back upon them. “Business invades not only economics and politics but also social experience, setting itself up as model for social administration in general.” (Lefebvre 1996:66) Social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-‐reactive, interdependent that social relations of production are both space forming and space contingent. Planking and walking involve no cooperation by institutional and market force. It rejects the ‘efFiciency’ and ‘economic’ logic of urban space, undertaking an activity, which by business standards is an entirely different rationale. It is indifferent to the exchangeability of the places through rents, leases and freeholds. Thus, it can act as a critical evidence to show our daily life.

Fight for Space

In Skateboarding, Space and the City, Architecture and the Body, Iain Borden, an architectural historian and urban commentator followed Lefebvre’s spatial theories to show the history of the skateboarding and in relation to architecture. He proposes that architecture is not merely an object, but part of the appropriation of the world, life and desires, space and time. “Because architecture promotes a knowledge about cities and space, it is also the site of imagination of experience, of critical re-‐examination” (Borden 2001: 9) Architecture is intended for the production of things – such as products as commodities in factories, knowledge in university and museums, labour power in housing, information and decisions in ofFices, and so on. Following this context, all buildings are places of the expenditure of energy, engaged in the production, and distribution of things. Planking, however, offers no such contribution, consuming the building while not engaging with its productive activity. It implicitly denies both that labour should be productive of things and that architecture should be directed toward that purpose. The decision making in the urban planning in society is often controlled by a small group of people. Take my hometown Hong Kong, a Financial-‐oriented city, as an example. The property and rental prices are skyrocketing in this densely populated area. Referring to Bloomberg, a Financial media data company, it stated that “ Hong Kong is the world’s most expensive place to buy a home because of a shortage of properties on the market, according to a study of the top four cities by Savills Plc. Hong Kong is 55 percent more expensive than London, based on an index published by the property broker that compares the U.K capital with other cities. Moscow is 7.4 percent more expensive than London and New York is 15 percent cheaper.” Famous for the cityscape pervaded by skyscrapers, most of them are for commercial purpose, business ofFices and private housing. The unaffordable property price and rent for home has triggered public anger. It was not until the recent unprecedented parade that the government decided to subsidise housing. The scheme was suspended in 2002 during the economic downturn. The recent protest is the conFlict of the dominant property developers’ monopoly in the housing market. Citizens laid down on public squares in front of their houses, and main roads in the city to paralyzed the transport.

Figure 14. Residents are against the property developer to build a 20-story residential tower adjacent to Block 8 of Mei Foo Complex. The new building would block their access to light and clean air. The conflict went into legal procedure.

Only then did the government Finally respond to the public. In the latest announcement of annual policy report, more council housing would be available in 2016. The anger towards the consumption of space is not limited to the living problem. Striving for more public space for street performance is also a long Fight in Hong Kong too. Only three to four streets in Hong Kong can we see are permitted for performance. Still, the street performers suffered pressured from external forces to disperse. Ironically, little stalls for commercial promotion invaded the streets. It is hard to walk freely in the streets in Monk Kok in Hong Kong, without crashing into another passersby.

Figure 15. Streetview of Mong Kok in Hong Kong.

“Capitalism is a mixture of production and speculation, alternatively sacriFicing long-‐term social beneFits to short term proFits or short-‐term social needs in favour of programmed investment schedules.”

(Lefebvre, 1991 : 335)

Planking in public places is more political than that in private place. The production of nothing labour is disruptive to the optimal management of urban space. The labour of planking is the effort of play. Planking promotes an appropriative recovery of time and space, without the explicit suggestion of the redistribution of urban space but the reformulation of the self according to the physical potential of the built environment. The experience of the self in relation to the city is here, the possession focuses on the sense of having. The rhythm of the city as external to the self and the rhythm of the self as intimate form of consciousness and behaviour are counterpoised.

Without constant oral and lived communication, planking would cease to be active. Indeed, this has already happened. The other fads, like owling and coning, have replaced planking in the public’s attention. Now there is less active discussion and less frequent update of the lying down photos on the social networking sites after almost half year of the First mass media news reporting the

fatal plank in May 2011. Planking is nothing less than a sensual, sensory, physical emotion and desire for one’s own body in engagement with the social and architectural surroundings. It is an image and action at a temporary time, a simultaneous production and release of human self, time, energy and space. Planking allows practitioners to see themselves as living according to a different rationale. Through the understanding of the “interconnections, distortions, displacements, mutual interactions of the different spaces”, stated by Lefebvre, we must constantly look around and posses critical thinking to our seemingly unspeakable everyday life.

Conclusion

At First glance, planking is just an attention-‐seeking activity for some laughs. It is only popular for a short while. When we look at it closer, it enunciates our thoughts to the urban space. Through the examination of academic theories and examples of body-‐related work in our daily life, we gather evidence to show that planking can be treated seriously, both physically and mentally. The planking action associated with high places gives us unconscious power and imagination of freedom. When we are lying on high place, looking downwards, it gives us a fear of falling. The fear triggers us to overcome it. The different vision gained from high places, gives us a new way of seeing. The panoptic vision offers us power, and shows our enthusiasm to escape from the banality of the routine life shaped by school, home and ofFice. It projects the human self. Planking is a highly sociable activity. It uses the body to speak, and communicate with others. It addresses the physical presence of the human body in urban space. Due to the act of lying down in unusual places, this spatial practice catches people’s focus. The simplicity of the action enables everyone to participate. It does not produce commodity for exchange but create social experience with humans and the city. It produces visual communication and creativity. It gives us a fresh perspective to the use of space and time. 28

The activity encourages humans to explore the city. In a modern city, human life is inseparable from machine and technology. They speed up the pace of our life. Through looking and Finding, the exploring process allows us to read the urban text. The silent action implicitly questions the use of urban space under capitalism. The specialness of the spatial practice, a combination of resting and walking in public space, enables us to grasp a hold on reading the seemingly unspeakable everyday life.

Bibliography

Books Citing Reference 1.

Borden, Iain. 2001. Skateboarding, Space and the City. Architecture and the Body. Oxford & NewYork: Berg

De Certeau, Michel.1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley Los Angeles London: University of California Press

Kayne, Nick. 2000. Site-‐SpeciNic Art – Performance, Place and Documentation. New York: Routledge

Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. London: Blackwell

Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writing of Cities. London: Blackwell

Moorhouse, Paul. 2002. Richard Long A Moving World. Cornwall: Tate St Ives.

Sinclair, Iain. 1997. Lights Out For The Territory. London: Granta

Solnit, Rebecca. 2002. Wanderlust, A History of Walking. London: Verso General Reading

Cotton, Charlotte. 2004. The Photograph As Contemporary Art. London: Thames & Hudson

Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography. Herts: Pocket Essential

Hutchinson, John; Gombrich, E.H.; Njatin Lela B; Mitchell W.J.T. Antony Gormley. 2007 2nd. London: Phaidon

Ford, Simon. 2005. The Situationist International A User’s Guide.London: Black Dog Publishing Knabb, Ken. Edit. 2006. Situationist International Anthology. Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets

5. 6. 7.

Lury, Celia. 2002. Prosthetic culture photography, memory and identity. London: Routledge Schechner, Richard. 2002. 2Ed.Performance Studies –An introduction. New York & London: Routledge

Film & Documentary

Dead Poets Society,1989. Film. Directed by Peter Weir. 128mins. USA: Silver Screen Partner.

Man On Wire, 2008. Documentary. Directed by James Marsh. 94mins. UK: Icon Production.

Internet Chapter 1 Alki, Steven., 2011. Coning [Internet]. Youtube. Available from <http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=WygNjMSllLQ> [Accessed 08 June 2011 ] BBC News Article, 2007. Naked Status on London Horizon. BBC News, 02 May [Internet]. Available from <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6614487.stm> [Accessed 05 October 2011] BBC News Magazine, 2011. Who, What, Why, What is planking? [Internet]. BBC News. Available from < http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-‐13414527 > [Accessed 17 May 2011] Daily Mail Reporter. 15 July 2011. Owling, It’s the New Planking! New Crouching Craze Springs Up on the Internet [Internet]. Dailymail. Available from <http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-‐2015034/Owling-‐new-‐planking-‐New-‐crouching-‐craze-‐ springs-‐internet.html> [Accessed 17 July 2011] Green, Tom., 1994. Tom Green Created Planking [Internet], Youtube. Available from < http://tomgreen.com/videos/youtube/tom-‐green-‐created-‐planking-‐1994> [Accessed 05 October 2011] Horemanning OfFicial Website [Internet]. Available from <http:// www.horsemanning.com/> [Accessed 16 July 2011] Leviating of Natsumi Hayashi. [Internet] Available from <http://yowayowacamera.com/ >[Accessed 05 June 2011] Searle, Adrian., 2007. Antony’s Arm [Internet]. The Guardian. Available from <http:// www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/may/15/art1> Accessed on (08 June 2011)

Chapter 2 Dailymail.co.uk. 2011. Made in Taiwan, the twins who have taken planking to another level [Internet], Daily Mail, 25 May. Available from <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ article-‐1390795/Planking-‐goes-‐political-‐Taiwanese-‐girls-‐thousands-‐fans-‐use-‐internet-‐ craze-‐promote-‐promote-‐social-‐causes.html#ixzz1bWhuNJ9s> [Accessed 10 October 2011] Dorner, Willi. 2007. Bodies in Urban Space [Internet]. Available from < http:// www.ciewdorner.at/index.php?page=work&wid=26> [Accessed 05 Aug 2011] Telegraph.co.uk. 2011.‘Planking’ craze used fro social protests in Taiwan[Internet]

Telegraph, 25 May. Available from <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/ taiwan/8536244/Planking-‐craze-‐used-‐for-‐social-‐protests-‐in-‐Taiwan.html> [Accessed 10 October 2011] Van den Boom, Bart., 2011. Body Talks Catalogue. Viewmaster Maastricht. Also available from <www.bodytalks.eu> [Internet], [Accessed 07 Oct 2011] Vtm. 2009. Op zoek naar Maria [Internet]. Available from <http://youtu.be/7EYAUazLI9k> [Accessed 05 June 2011]

Chapter 3

Boykoff, Pamela., 2011. Hong Kong’s Property Divide [Internet]. CNN Asia. Available from <http://business.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/19/hong-‐kongs-‐property-‐divide/> [Accessed 10 June 2011] Radiohead,1995. Just [Internet]. Available from <http://vimeo.com/10975724> [Accessed 10 October 2011] Packard, Simon. 2011. Hong Kong Is World’s Most Expensive Place to Buy Home on Property Shortage [Internet]. Bloomberg, 28 Jan. Available from <http://www.bloomberg.com/ news/2011-‐01-‐28/hong-‐kong-‐is-‐world-‐s-‐most-‐expensive-‐place-‐to-‐buy-‐home-‐on-‐ property-‐shortage.html>.[Accessed 23 October 2011]

Figure of Illustration

Fig. 1. Green, Tom. 1994. “Tom Green Planking”. Screenshot image from Youtube video. Fig. 2. Planking by Gordon Ramsay. 2011. Imaged taken from Facebook Planking group. Fig. 3.Chung, WY. 2011. Planking on a printer in CSM. Fig. 4.Chung, WY. 2011. Planking on a girder in CSM. Fig. 5. Last scene in Dead Poet Society. Screenshot image from the Film Dead Poet Society. Fig. 6. Philippe Petit Walked Across the World Trade Centre towers. Screenshot image from the documentary Man On Wire. Fig. 7. Dyson, Jim. 2007. Event Horizon, sculpture by Antony Gormley. The Guardian. Image taken from <http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/may/03/ art#/?picture=329805789&index=7> Fig. 8. Chung, WY. Street Performance in Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2011. Fig. 9. Chung, WY. 2011. Planking in CSM library. Fig. 10. Wall Street Journal. 2010. Bodies in Urban Spaces in New York. Image taken from <http://blogs.wsj.com/photojournal/2010/09/26/bodies-‐in-‐urban-‐spaces/ > Fig. 11. PK Girls In Front of the National Chiang Kai-‐she Memorial Hall. Image taken from PK girls’ Facebook group. Fig. 12. PK Girls in Sanshui St. Market in Taipei. Image taken from PK girls’ Facebook group. Fig. 13. Sound of Music in Antwerpen Central Station. Screenshot image from Youtube. Fig. 14. Lying Down Scene in Just. Screenshot image from Radiohead’s music video, Just in Youtube.

Fig. 15. Inmediahk. 2011. Residents Lying On a Street to Against Property Developer. Image taken from <http://www.Flickr.com/photos/inmediahk/5584825029/in/ photostream/>

Fig. 16. Complaints Choir of Hong Kong. 2011. Monk Kok Street View. Image taken from <http://farm4.static.Flickr.com/3575/3545574188_9292f577ee.jpg>

Appendix Interview with active planking member on Facebook discussion group, Jordan Mann, 14 years old from California on 07 June 2011.

1. When did u .irst hear about planking? About two weeks ago, from a friend and we just went around and planking and now its something we do a lot. 2. What do you feel and get from the game? Do you do planking with friends? My friends and me really enjoy it. It is something to get us away from what other kids are doing in my town and yeah that’s Fine.

3. How long does it take for the whole planking process? Where would you conduct planking? As far as the planking, my friends and me just go out on bike around our town and neighboring towns and just whatever we see we plank. It is kind of like a mild spot for less athletic people XD. 4. How long do you think the trend will last? Those kinds of things happen I mean sooner or later planking will get boring so people will move onto something different but we live in the moment and it does not matter what people think as long as your living your life that is all the matters. 5. How do you think about planking?   Living where I live you learn to not really care what other people say or care just how kids around me grow up. I really do its something that lets us show our creativity and how we do it, who we do it with, and all that kind of stuff. 6. What do people react when you are planking? Most people do not mind but there are times were we stop

trafFic and a few times some cops came and yelled but other than that nothing really just a lot of people at school telling us were crazy. Some people just see it as a dumb activity because were just laying face down but who is to say that is dumb? Cause if you ask me watching a bunch of grown men run around and kick balls into nets for a living that sounds pretty dumb. I mean not putting anybody down but yea just how I look at it.

7. Would you conduct planking during travel? I try but its not really all that fun with my family because 1. 2.

Nobody will take the picture and My mother always gets mad but I am going to try when I go to San Francisco this summer and also when I go to the Great Canyon.

8. I wonder the participants can take the pictures themselves just like normal tourist photos. That would be cool but really difFicult because you would not really get the full image because planking is more of a full body photo. Also, the fun comes in when you have friends that make it fun. Oh! Just an advice, do not try planking on a Fire hydrant, very painful.