The crowd, this “strange creature with a thousand heads” which grabs everyone at the turn of a demonstration, a festival or a social network, is exhibited at the Musée de la civilization de Québec (MCQ), in a presentation which proposes to demystify the physics which governs its movements, explains its excesses and dictates its unconscious codes.
Humans, an eminently social animal, never escape the crowd. A walk downtown, an indoor show or, why not, a visit to a national museum are all opportunities to be part of it. Science has put its magnifying glass on this phenomenon and the MCQ invites its audience to understand its unconscious laws in a popularized, fun and frankly fascinating way.
First presented at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in Paris, the exhibition Crowds. Human laboratory comes to Quebec in a completely local adaptation. Born from the work of researcher Mehdi Moussaïd, author of Fouloscopy: what the crowd says about us and researcher in cognitive sciences, who, for the record, started out at UQAM in 2004, the exhibition offers an interactive immersion full of anecdotes at the heart of the psychology of the multitude.
How is a crowd measured? What causes its “tremor”, this collective movement which dissolves and carries away its individual components? Why does an infinity of units form a whole that moves, sings, is enthusiastic or indignant in chorus? The one-hour course offered in Quebec City casts its net into the great sea of sciences to bring up answers from both physics and data analysis.
Every object of study has its unit of measurement, and that of the crowd is called, unsurprisingly, density. The exhibition begins with a coring illustration of five different spatial occupations. The sight of a three-dimensional body, alone in a square meter, will not excite agoraphobes: add eight people in this same space, on the other hand, and the bad memories of a journey on board a crowded metro will come back in memory for sure. Discomfort too.
A host of paradoxes
This is one of the many paradoxes of the crowd: it magnifies the exaltation of great celebrations as much as it repels, frightens, inconveniences and sometimes gives license to the greatest outbreaks of violence. It allows the communion of the masses, but at the same time serves as fuel for pandemics. The crowd, capable of the worst, but also of the best, escapes easy conclusions.
The exhibition nevertheless allows us to better understand the bird and to thwart certain stubborn stereotypes about it. The mob doesn’t just reduce the collective intelligence quotient to its lowest common denominator. Science, again, has proven that the solidarity of the multitude, during dramatic events such as the fall of the World Trade Center towers in New York or the attack at the Bataclan in Paris, made it possible to save lives.
Thanks to the crowd, “the collective can correct individual errors”, in the words of researcher Moussaïd. A room with a few microphones and three Quebec songs is enough to prove it: even if each voice taken separately is atrociously false, a musicality nevertheless emerges from the whole. Ask 788 people how much the beef placed in front of them weighs and they will be completely wrong. Average their answers, however, and the overall estimate will be within 4 kg of accuracy!
International partnerships to multiply
Crowds. Human laboratory also teaches how the daily interactions of the multitude blend into a harmony without a conductor. In a crowded corridor, a crowd instinctively splits into two depending on the direction of traffic. In the animal kingdom, only termites and ants share the civil effectiveness of this “bidirectional circulation”.
The end of the exhibition invites everyone to play crowd tamer thanks to an ingenious discovery that places the public in the chair of observers and those observed. The outcome of Crowds also tests the ability of the crowd to make the individual capable of transgressing its limits and prohibitions. Will the public commit the sacrilege of coloring the immaculate walls of the museum despite instructions prohibiting it? In Paris, a first disobedience was enough to lead to a thousand others. To see if the Quebec crowd will prove more “docile” than the French cousins despite a first graffiti executed by none other than the new director of the institution, Julie Lemieux.
With Crowdsthe latter is also inaugurating her first exhibition since her still fresh appointment in November. She hopes, during her mandate, to increase international collaborations similar to that which allowed Crowds to cross the Atlantic. “That will be the key,” specifies the new director. We still lost funding from the City of Quebec for our next budget and we will have to reorganize our ways of doing things. Partnerships, in fact, are less costly for the Museum, but just as creative and interesting. »
