How does a mass of people become an audience?  Through effective crowd control, technologies that channel flows of bodies.  Scott Kushner’s project “Crowd Control: Organizing Audiences around Spectacle in the Industrial Era” uses archival evidence to show the ways that Industrial-era crowd control technologies sought to organize masses into docile audiences. 

By rationalizing the masses that formed around cultural events, technologies such as turnstiles, bleachers, stanchions, and barriers framed crowd control in terms of maintaining order and reducing risk.