The project was first conducted on October 02-03, 2004 in conjunction with Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City.

Starting at a café at 10am on a Saturday, we had breakfast and then split up to walk through city. As Lee located the first stranger and began following, Christina waited.

When Lee’s stranger became "un-followable," by entering a taxi, he sent Christina a text message to activate her following process and pause his own.

The walk continued as we wandered individually through various neighborhoods in lower Manhattan, following strangers until they entered their homes, the subway, churches, the gym or other places.

By entering a private space or somewhere other than the sidewalk, the strangers [unknowingly] triggered the switch between us and became disengaged from our process.

While following, or "on," we maintained an intense awareness of a single stranger and his or her unknown destination. While "off," we rested, blending into the peculiarities of our surroundings and experiencing a sense of quiet engagement with the city.

However, because the switch from one to the other of us was determined by the actions of the strangers, it was at times exhaustingly rapid or frustratingly slow. Throughout the day and night, we kept a mobile record of our progress with text messages and photos uploaded to a project moblog

24 hours later we met back at the same spot, having documented our experience with still photographs, camera-phone photos and video of over 60 strangers followed. The duration of the 'Following "The Man of the Crowd"' project is not only a reflection of Poe's story of obsession and endurance, but is also an expression of our desire to experience the city and its residents at all hours. We are currently expanding the project to conduct a series of similar collaborative walking experiments with new rules and methods.