Amulet Walk on the Rue Neuve

After an amulet workshop, it is advisable to give it a collective run in the public space, to feel the energy of collective obfuscation. While shopping malls or airports are good candidates due to their very likely wireless tracking activities, in certain cities public footfall systems can offer a live feedback of the effects of amulets.

For example, in occasion of the Covid-19 epidemic, the city of Brussels decided to permanently install a footfall setup to monitor crowd density on the main shopping street Rue Neuve. The system, developed by the ULB Opera group, includes a website to track the crowd at a certain hour of the day, assigning a color (green-orange-red) to signal the crowd density, as well as forecasting the rest of the day based on different prediction algorhytms. This is made possible by the installation of a dozen grey boxes hanging at equal distances along the street, capturing probe requests from the passerby’s phones, storing them in a database to later analyse them. In addition to that, the city of Brussels installed two checkpoints at both main entrances of the street, which would close the path of shoppers in case of a high crowd density (RED).

This spectacular setup has been the perfect setting for group walks to test Amulets: coming with a large enough group of amulet bearers late in the evening with a completely empty street, the signaling system has turned red!