Efficient urban design, attention-grabbing screens and isolating headphones all mean we’re rapidly losing the art and joy of spontaneous encounters. But artist Andy Field has a plan for how we can start to connect again…
ndy Field reckons your life doesn’t have enough randomness in it – but don’t worry, it’s not your fault. “We’re sitting right in the middle of the problem,” he says, gesturing out of a café window towards the Olympic Park in east London. “No one is explicitly telling you don’t do this, don’t do that. But there’s no scope for the visitors to this park to be able to determine its meaning, which is the true joy of any park.
We no longer linger in public spaces and even if we are able to, we’re inevitably locked into our phones You might argue that Field and I have met – encountered – one another just fine. But our encounter has been steered into a defined space and behaviour: sit here, buy a coffee and interact in an approved manner. We speculate what might happen if we decided to interact in a different way by, say, trying to climb one of the park’s many impeccably manicured trees, like we might have done when we were kids.
That experience, he says, helped smooth the journey from thinking about how we meet each other in the context of art to thinking about the way we meet each other in the world. “It dawned on me that the thread was the idea of the encounter – everything I was making was about trying to create opportunities for people to meet each other.”, whose work borrows from the everyday to make us think about neighbours and neighbourhoods and how we interact with the other people living around us.
But no matter what you say about the benefits of bumping into strangers, approaching people is hard, isn’t it? Do you need to be an extrovert? Is Field an extrovert? He grins: “If I arrive at a party, I will probably stand towards the edge. My friends would say I’m certainly loud enough to be an extrovert – and I think if I’m in print saying I’m introverted, they would give me a hard time about it – but I’m certainly not a super-confident person who is going to waltz up to every person I see.
Field’s dog came four years ago. “The great thing about a dog is that it’s the most brilliant kind of invitation for people to come up and speak to you. You immediately break down that suspicion, this fear that we all carry that people are different to us and wouldn’t have anything to say to us,” he says, going on to reference a study at the University of Warwick in which a researcher recorded every human encounter she had with and without a dog for 10 days.
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