Flash Mob in the Cultural Field of Contemporary Russia

Flash mob has originated in 2003 in New York and quickly spread into other countries. In particular, in the same year the practice of flash mob was already implemented in Russia. During the next 16 years and up to the present flash mobs remain popular, and in the Russian context in particularly. Although the logic of flash mob evolution is similar in Russia and abroad (aim for commercialization, format diversity and emergence of fully online flash mobs can be highlighted among others), Russian context is distinguished by a strong dichotomy between flash mob as a format appropriated by marketing and other institutions to implement their own discourse, and flash mob as a subcultural, half-underground practice. The first type occurs more visible, spread and has more chances to be documented. Meanwhile the traces of the second type need to be recovered. The “original flash mob” (the way it was imagined by the founder Bill Wasik) can hardly be distinguished in the modern Russian cultural field. Thus, the main interest of this work is to detect variations of flash mob as an underground practice in the Russian context by defining borders with adjacent phenomena, describe the way it works, its history and the dynamics of its development. To do this, I have to develop an archive of existing Russian flash mob documentation of the last 16 years, analyze how, on which platforms and which flash mobs are recorded, define their specificity, formed, in particular, as a result of cultural transfer by the means of comparing them with the “original flash mob” and analysing the means of describing the phenomena from inside. The existence of Russian flash mob seems obvious, but nevertheless has not yet been described by researchers. The study if this phenomenon will allow to point out its evidence and place it in the tendencies of modern Russian urban culture, and, in particular, address the influence of flash mob on the disposition of power relations inside this culture by tracking the protest potential, implicitly included in the phenomenon, and how and to what extent it can be realized. Finally, since flash mob reflects the need to become associated with a community by the means of performative and/or artistic practice and relations, established between the collective and individual forms of existence inside a culture, its analysis can be used as a key to describe the named processes in the framework of Russian culture.