Improv Everywhere: Subway Art Gallery

On the same day Improv Everywhere ran their MP3 experiment here on Roosevelt Island, Agents of IE also set up an underground art gallery on the subway platform giving residents and visitors a taste of an earlier event they ran at another "platform gallery". As opposed to that earlier experiment we did not get the full black tie treatment (see linked post & video) but the photos and "art descriptions" of the local installations were still fun to read and see today.

Thanks to fleepy_99 from Flickr for permission to use her photos and text. To see her complete photo set of the show link here.

"This piece, inspired by the "The Treachery of Images" pipe painting by René Magritte, mirrors that famous work with the suggestion that although the sign claims the availability of assistance through the mediation of an intercom, the assistance which is described will not be forthcoming, just as the pipe in the painting was not, in fact, a pipe: just an emotionally unsatisfying painting of a pipe."

"This surrealist piece plays on the idea that the mystery of what is inside sparks the imagination more than the reality of what is inside. Perhaps concealing an electrical panel, or labyrinthine underground passageways, this locked space nevertheless fascinates us, introducing the possibility that the unseen space contains hidden wonders"

"These speakers, eerily silent, engage the viewer in a peculiar non-discourse as a commentary on the ineffable nature of technologically-mediated communication within the quasi-unreal space of commuting.
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"Intended to be purely ornamental in contrast to the escalators, these antiquated sequentially raised steps draw the viewer to inescapable conclusions about the mechanically-mediated nature of movement in technological society."