The Lying Down Game

Found photography.
Presented as installation (538 images in various sizes)
or as a slide show (139 min).

The Lying Down Game also known as Planking was a global internet phenomenon that peaked between 2009 and 2011. To participate, a person had to lie face down, perfectly rigid, with both arms pressed against the sides of the body to mimic a wooden plank. The performance involved either lying flat on the ground or balancing precariously on top of structures. Seeking out unusual or hazardous locations and documenting them for online display was a defining element of the practice.

The simplicity of planking functions as a democratic performance mechanism, dismantling traditional demographic boundaries of class, gender, age, and ethnicity. This activity could be made be anyone, anywhere. Visually, the documentation of people planking unintentionally replicates the formal documentation of historic conceptual performances by Dennis Oppenheim, Erwin Wurm, and Charles Ray.

Having thrived as a vivid, ubiquitous phenomenon for a couple of years, planking suffered an abrupt cultural erasure. This collection focuses on the intersection of mass digital participation and performance art, alongside the sociological trajectory of the phenomenon itself.

This collection of images acts as a formal preservation of that forgotten digital archive and one day I’ll make a book with these images.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

back