Team Rubber BlogTeam Rubber talks on the Internet in a blog

We’re two weeks into my Media Internship with Team Rubber, and, though I can’t speak for everybody, it’s been a weird fortnight for me. After living the laid-back student lifestyle for three years (studying English, not Medicine, obviously) I’m suddenly surrounded by people who can be creative on demand. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes even all day.

As a stranger to off-the-cuff performance, I’d be disappointing in ‘One And Other.’ It’s Antony Gormley’s latest idea, as I’m sure you know: filling the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square with the activities of a different randomly-selected member of the public every hour, for 100 days. On-demand creativity (or lack of it) has never been more exposed.

Take the girl up there now, Ciara, swigging with deliberation from a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. She’s not badly-dressed, in fact quite conventionally on-trend, and her bio says she ‘co-runs an art space,’ but she doesn’t seem to have any bright ideas on how to use her hour on the plinth apart from smiling rather inanely. Being up there is enough for her. (Edit: The next girl does exactly the same, minus the champagne.)

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the whole curious experiment is the interaction it’s inviting, both online and offline. There’s a live webstream on www.oneandother.co.uk from which the view is better than the one tourists get in the plinth’s immediate vicinity. The Guardian is panting for details, setting up ‘plinthwatch’ on Twitter and Flickr, so readers can “help us document” the event. I’m sporadically searching #oneandother for the many pithy comments, and looking forward to the weekly highlights (catch them tonight at 7 on Sky Arts.

Gormley’s plinth has a certain amount in common with the internet itself, in that it’s a catalyst for interaction, communication, and debate, while at the same time being a godsend to the ordinary exhibitionist. One person, one pedestal, one hour of being beamed around the world, talked about, slagged off or idolized: frankly, I’m amazed so many people want to do it. But they do. Plinthgoers (a good proportion of them Art students, but not all) are embracing their hour in the spotlight. Gormley’s intention is to build up a picture of Britain. So far, so representative, in that these days, it seems perfectly normal to believe you have a right to be famous.

Whether everyone with a voice deserves an audience is debatable, but what’s amazing is that this democratic opportunity for self-promotion does exist online. Everyone has the chance to introduce themselves to the world, and share their love of llamas, Civil War re-enactments, scrabble, giant foods, or whatever their passion may be. Ordinary people no longer need financial backing, political influence or a twenty-six foot high column to share what they think. Personally, I’m taking the ‘One And Other’ project as a celebration of the fact that literally anybody with access to an internet connection has a platform they can use to be themselves. Fortunately – to borrow a pun from Boris Johnson – if there’s one out there for everybody, I can have faith that some day my plinth will come.

(Sorry. I’m pretty sure I just earned myself an hour on a stone platform, in the rain, dressed as a rubber duck.)