The Crowd (2015) is an attempt to foresee the future. The film imagines and examines three hundred New Yorkers visiting Parreno’s future exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory. The work was filmed inside the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory, the same place where the film was shown during his solo exhibition in summer 2015. The crowd filmed in the space was hypnotised moving through the space being drawn together by an invisible piano playing music. Shadows and clouds of smoke lace around images of bodies in movement, appearing as diaphanous visions.
It is a science fiction film as the crowd is seeing the show before it happens. By the time the work was presented in the actual exhibition the crowd only existed in the past. In this work the past, present and the future exist in the same place and intertwine. Solaris by Tarkovsky (1972) served Parreno as a reference for this work, a film which reinvented the science fiction genre and referred to the inadequacy of language between humans and other species.