Andy Discipline reckons your life doesn’t have sufficient randomness in it – however don’t fear, it’s not your fault. “We’re sitting proper in the course of the issue,” he says, gesturing out of a café window in the direction of the Olympic Park in east London. “Nobody is explicitly telling you don’t do that, don’t do this. However there’s no scope for the guests to this park to have the ability to decide its that means, which is the true pleasure of any park. It’s like: this bit’s for sitting, this bit’s for strolling and that is for exercising.”
It sits in opposition to extra conventional public parks which are clean canvases, offering a ragged “geography of openness and chance”. These locations invite, say, a pickup soccer sport, a canine let free, a blanket unfold on the bottom which might all result in the type of human encounters we’re more and more lower off from. However the Olympic Park is a spot, he says, that appears to exist primarily for customers to be ushered by as swiftly and simply as potential with out lingering, besides in strictly designated areas. The chance for helpful random encounters has been designed out, to our detriment – and it’s one thing that’s affecting increasingly more of our public areas.
Discipline, 39, a “barely undefinable” artist and author, is fixated on the thought of those random human encounters – good, unhealthy or detached – and has written a e-book on the topic, Encounterism: the Uncared for Joys of Being in Individual. At its coronary heart is the concept in in search of to make our public areas frictionless and our devices ubiquitous, architects, city planners and tech designers have left us little alternative to do the issues that enable us to attach with others. We not linger in public areas and even when we’re capable of, we’re inevitably locked into our telephones, remoted and unapproachable. On this approach the chance for random, probability encounters has been eliminated. And an encounter, he reminds us, is so essential as a result of it affords the chance to “sit with the discomfort of our variations till one thing new blooms out of them”. It’s how we be taught to reside with one another.
