Most interestingly, it’s inspired people in 70 other cities in 34 countries to stage their own freeze mission. Thousands of Global Agents worldwide in places like Romania, Poland, Italy, China, Sweden, and New Zealand have come together to make time stop for five short minutes. Below is a roundup of all of the videos we’ve seen of the various global freeze events. Congrats to all of the local organizers, and remember you can get involved yourself at IE Global.
We wanted to give an update on our friends Ghosts of Pasha. For the unfamiliar, Ghosts of Pasha are the Vermont band that we randomly chose to give The Best Gig Ever to back in 2004. The mission wound up getting covered by Spin, Rolling Stone, and both the radio and TV versions of This American Life. Anyway, GOP has a new album out (buy it here) and recently made an appearance on a late night TV show in Vermont. Take a look:
They also have a bunch of great new songs on their MySpace page. Enjoy the video of our Best Gig Ever mission below. (This was over three years ago and was the band’s third show ever.)
For our latest mission, three agents entered a Starbucks one by one with their own giant desktop computer and CRT monitor. They bought coffee and worked at their computers as if they were laptops. One computer even had a Wi-Fi card installed, enabling our agent to surf the web. Enjoy the videos first and then go behind the scenes with our photo report below.
The local IE Global group in Singapore has completed their first mission.
They report:
The objective of the mission was pretty simple, point your phones up at the big giant red lantern and keep looking up for 5 minutes. Planning missions in Singapore prove to be a difficult task due to the potential legal issues. We have a law here that prevents us from gathering in groups larger than 4 people.
We have found a long term solution for our hosting. A very cool San Francisco company, Joyent, has generously volunteered to host us free of charge. A huge thanks to David Young and everyone at Joyent for helping us out. We’re now proudly rocking an “Accelerated by Joyent” badge in our sidebar. The next time we have a mission go viral, our site should be ready. Thanks be to Scott Beale from Laughing Squid for connecting us with Joyent.
Thanks are also due to our tireless IT Agent, Wade Minter, for making the transition to the new server and all of his hard work on this site over the years.
Finally a huge thanks to all of you who made a donation over the past few weeks. We had nearly $900 in bandwidth bills and your donations covered it all. Lots of people giving $5 and $10 really adds up. We don’t have an immediate need for more donations at this time, but we always welcome them. Your donations help us buy equipment to further our missions, like a new hidden glasses camera to replace the 10-year old model we have now (on loan from The Upright Citizens Brigade.)
Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places. Created in August of 2001 by Charlie Todd, Improv Everywhere has executed over 80 missions involving thousands of undercover agents. The group is based in New York City.
