We must not lose sight of working with people we love working with… Therefore, meet in person, share those experiences, get hungry together, get hot/cold together, share in each other’s pains, radiate, share in joy, confidence, awkwardness, nervousness, and everything else that defines what it is to exist on this planet – together. Andy Field – along with his partner Beckie Darlington – have an international programme of projects which is really helping forge the next generation of architects, planners, urban designers and flaneurs, by asking them what they want from their cities.

A portrait that is so joyous and insightful that I couldn't help but see my own everyday interactions in a whole new light. Receiving no public funding, the RA depends on the continuing generosity of our supporters and Friends.A playful, analytical, informed, and poetic exploration of the delight and transformative power of real-life encounters. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Into this precarious state of affairs steps “Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person,” an argument by the British artist Andy Field for venturing out among the populace. From the hairdressers's chair to sitting with others in a car, and fleeting meetings while walking in the park, Field examines the nature, grace, and importance of everyday, face-to-face human interactions. As human-beings with over 14 unique senses, just remember that Zoom/Teams only caters to two of those senses.

We collaborate with authors across all adult fiction genres, and also handle children’s books, young adult and cross-over fiction. What understanding of the world, and of each other, are we depriving ourselves of as we spend less and less time in proximity to all these strangers and their lives that are so very different from our own?The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

It allows him to reminisce on the original joys and behaviour patterns of past decades (and millenia) and mix them with the new post-internet, post-pandemic age we live in. Haughty nightclubs, community parks, backs of car seats and movie theaters give us physical space to relate differently, and be different. Encounterism is a joyous immersion into the everyday pleasure and shared humanity we stand to lose in an increasingly digital world.

This attention to detail flourishes in other chapters too, such as the John Updike "Spring Rain" references or the euphoric nightclub leitmotif of "Your Love". In this deeply rewarding book, Andy Field brings together history, science, psychology, queer theory, and pop culture with his love of urban life and his own experiences―both as a city-dweller and as a performance artist―to forge creative connections: walking hand-in-hand with strangers, knocking on doors, staging encounters in parked cars. The light touch of a hairdresser's hands on one's scalp, the euphoric energy of a nightclub, huddling with strangers under a shelter in the rain, a spontaneous snowball fight in the street, a daily interaction with a homeless man--such mundane connections, when we closely inhabit the same space, and touch or are touched by others, were nearly lost to "social distancing. Why auditoriums, theatres, cinemas (and the act of being-in-person) goes beyond the spatial and visual; and can even be chemical – ‘literally breathing each other in’. To me, the word "encounter" brings back the groups in that I participated back in the 1970s, we spent a couple of hours each time sitting on bean bags in a circle.