Ben
Brantley

March 17, 2015

I am but a member of the horde, a cipher among countless ciphers. We swarm through the city’s streets and subways, moving together like parts in a machine. We are replaceable, we are erasable, we are disposable. Soon no one will know we existed. That’s what a little voice kept telling me on a recent New York afternoon. It was issuing from a set of headphones I had been given while standing in a graveyard in Brooklyn, but it might as well have been coming from inside my head. I mean, doesn’t everyone who’s spent time in a crowded urban environment entertain such grim speculations? “Remote New York” — a remarkably efficient if seldom surprising exercise in crowd control from the German arts collective Rimini Protokoll — gives precise and neutral voice to thoughts most veteran city dwellers surely have on a regular basis. Created by Stefan Kaegi, this interactive piece of street theater assembles a throng of paying participants, and then sends them onto a meticulously plotted tour of New York City and their own herd mentality.