After my previous two celery interventions I wondered:
What if the problem wasn’t the object at all, but the audience? What if the celery didn’t need to change we did?
So for this third experiment, I shifted my focus away from the vegetable itself and toward the reaction. Not natural reactions. Staged ones. Because in the end, most of us look to others when deciding how to respond to something unfamiliar. Curiosity is contagious. Confusion, too. You probably know that classic social experiment: Place a few people on a busy street and have them look up.
Before long, passersby will start doing the same, searching the sky for meaning, even if there’s nothing there. There’s a term for that: social proof, the idea that we take cues from others to determine what’s valuable, interesting or worth paying attention to.
The Setup
The location: FH Joanneum campus, in the space between buildings 152 and 154. It’s a place where students and lecturers pass through regularly. I leaned a regular (unpainted ) celery stalk against a wall. Then, I recruited three classmates who were in on the plan.
Phase 1: They simply stood around the celery, staring at it.
Phase 2: They had notebooks and pretended to take notes.
Phase 3: They began discussing it out loud, commenting, theorizing, asking questions
Nothing much happened. Some students walked by without a second glance. A few others looked over, maybe puzzled, but didn’t stop. One person slowed down, looked for a few seconds, and kept going. That was it. We didn’t draw a crowd. We didn’t cause a scene. And that was kind of fascinating.
Design School as a Buffer Zone
Here’s my theory: because we were standing on a design campus, the entire act was already halfway normalized. If three students are gathered around a wall, admiring something random, could just be another weird student project, right? We’re in Communication Design. We’re supposed to be odd. In another context, a shopping mall, a corporate place, maybe we would’ve drawn more attention. Maybe people would’ve been curious. But in this setting art is expected.
Afterward, I asked my classmates how they felt during the performance. And to no surprise: awkward They felt awkward, almost embarrassed.
Pretending to be fascinated by a vegetable even as a joke made them feel weird. Honestly, I love that. It meant the experiment didn’t just act on others, it acted on us.
We were simulating awe, but still feeling something real: discomfort, playfulness, curiosity. Maybe that’s the fascinating part of performance art, it turns everyone involved into both subject and audience. This experiment made me think about how often we borrow meaning from others. How much of our interest is truly self-generated? If a crowd forms, we assume something important is happening. If no one reacts, we move on. So what happens when we manufacture the crowd?
Does the art become more “real”? Or more absurd?
