Torsten Lauschmann – World Jump Day
Posted by Fabio 30 November 2012
When artist Torsten Lauschmann was a child his mother told him a story about everybody in China jumping at the same time to knock Planet Earth out of its orbit.
“If I remember it right, the story was told to illustrate the relative size of the China’s population and not to scare the hell of me. In 2005 I suddenly realised that the nature and popularity of the internet would make it possible to organise such an event by myself. After a bit of reading about general Physics and planetary movements I put together a website which would calculate the exact time of the jump dictated by every person’s location. The jump was suppose to move Planet Earth into a safer orbit to reduce global warming and other ecological dangers. It was an attempt to shortcut politics through humour and symbolism. When the website was finished I send the link to around 20 friends expecting nothing more than a few giggles.
After 4 weeks the website had accumulated more than one million hits and it went viral worldwide from there. Newspapers in China, Radio shows in Texas, TV News in Argentina all wanted to speak to the made up and completely unconvincing Scientist Dr.Hans Niesward. Unsurprisingly Marketing Departments around the globe wanted to spoil the ideas with their product endorsements.
On July 20, 7.39 am GMT the jump happened. For some banal reason I missed it, but I do remember feeling a wee tremor that day.”_Torsten Lauschmann
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