I was looking the wrong way when a runner brushed past me at the Tate Britain in Martin Creed’s Work No 850. The waiting is part of the piece – there is calm interrupted by the burst of activity. Many viewers would arrive in the space knowing that the running is going to happen, but with only the vaguest idea as to the direction, speed or frequency. So the actual happening is a surprise, despite knowledge of the facts.
I thought they would run along a line, but instead the runner navigates through the clumps of slow-moving people.
A crowd moving is a good example of self-organisation. Every single person in a crowd has a destination in mind, but each has to cooperate with the whole in order to reach their goal. Craig Reynolds analysed the movement of flocks, herds and schools in Boids, identifying three behaviours between each boid and its immediately local neighbours: separation, alignment and cohesion. Adherence to these simple rules ends up with the complex patterns you get in shoals of fish.
People reading their text messages while walking in a crowd ask for others to adapt to their absence from the game. And while it’s very wrong to cycle at high speed through a pedestrian precinct, it’s exhilarating to predict where the gaps are going to be, then make your choice, adjusting if necessary.
Walking to the cloakroom adjacent to the main gallery, you occasionally see one of the athletes walking on their way back to the start line, looking flushed but concentrated. I’m not sure if that counts as part of the work. Does it start and stop within the gallery? Are we allowed to look at them as subjects of an art piece, or have they become part of the crowd again?
The runner in the photo was a precursor to Work No 850, spotted over three years ago.