PLANKING

PLANKING

History: -

The precursor to planking began in 1984, called "Face Dancing". The participants were two high school boys, who decided to lie face down on a baseball field whilst a game was under way. This was done ultimately to gain a reaction. The first planking activity captured was a video of Tom Green performing a stunt entitled "Dead Guy" in 1994. The footage showed Green lying face down on a sidewalk without moving. It was recorded for MTV, however it was never aired as it was "a very obscure piece of video". In 1997, two young boys created the "Lying Down Game", these boys would continue to play the game for ten more years before they created a Facebook page. The Facebook page invited participants of the game to share photos of their most craziest, original planking photos. The term "Planking" was coined in 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planking_(fad)#Variations | Variations

By becoming obsessed with obtaining the most impressive planking photo, the individual loses sight of the level of impending danger that they face. The quality of the planking photo outweighs their own regard for life.

The planking fad resulted in many serious and some fatal accidents. It is now redundant.

First Brainstorm

After our research on planking and the presentation we gave the first day we both missed a certain statement. We both visually matched the drowned and washed up refugees to planking. The big contrast ofcourse is the horrific images of the refugees are real and it's a situation that needs a lot of attention. Non theless we felt like the images of the refugees became a hype and even a Meme in itself. All-over facebook people are sharing articles about and pictures of the refugees. But besides that people are also sharing artikels and comments of people about the refugees and comment on them. So the "war" between the "help-the-refugees" and the "don't-help-the-refugees" became on online topic seemingly as "populair" as the "refugeessituation" itself. The sharing images and articels became a "hype" like planking was. The image of the little boy on the beach became so well known and sort of symbol or refugees icon. Many artist used this image a inspiration to make a statement about the urgent situation.

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Because we wanted to try and give an planking image meaning we thought about combining the two. On the one hand to give the (forgotten hype) planking "new life" and a meaning and on the other hand to show that sharing stuff about refugees or the opinion of people about them isn't going to change the situation. We thought about combining images of refugees with planking people or write a qoute on it and in that way make our own MEME.