Shopping centres serve as laboratories for control: here not only the cooperation between cctv and security guards is trained already for a long time and the capacity of architecture to direct people is tested. Everybody, who enters these places, trains as well: to behave rightly in oder not to attract any attention. The orderliness is produced by the constant repition of always the same gestures and movements: The distance from a shop window, the speed of walking, the way a plastic bag is carried – the consumers repeat a certain set of gestures, which makes every deviation visible immediately. The reward they receive for complying with the regulations is, that they do not get regulated openly. The repessive system of control normally works inconspisciously, so that it does not generate interruptions itself.
The Laboratory for uncontrollable situations poses the question, how a collective agency can be found in these spaces - underneath the threshold of surveillance. It proposes an intervention, that refrains from becoming spectacular and thus commodity-like itself. It´s aim is to make movements and gestures possible, that deviate from the normal ones in the space. It´s means is the radio: The researchers of the laboratory listen to a radio play, which suggests them to perform certain movements and gestures. These movements are derived from the space itself, so they do not really differ from what everybody else is doing there. But being performed collectively and synchronically, they deviate from normality and immediatley alienate the situation, when they get visible. Amidst the dispersed collective of consumers the laboratory establishes a dispersed collective of producers, producing an uncanny siutation - by simply parodying the regulated normality of every day life.
