The way that you played the game, … was by pretending that you weren’t playing the game. That you were just an ordinary man who was walking through this square … You just happen to have a giant standard lamp about your person. And a sofa.
Andy Field’s description of his early performance game, Checkpoint, captures the kernel of truth smuggled in amongst the playful. absurdity: the duality of the ordinary within the extraordinary, and the extraordinary within the ordinary. It is a fascination that we see in his latest book, Encounterism, which considers the delicate networks of social theatre that make up our everyday lives.
We welcome Andy, an artist, writer and curator, into the Voidspace to talk about this work, about performance art, reenactment, and turning up the volume on the dynamics of everyday encounters that we so often take for granted.
Voidspace:
Hello, Andy, and welcome to the Voidspace. I’m so happy to have you in here today.
Andy Field:
Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here in this void with you.
Voidspace:
I imagine it as an attic, like a voidspace in a house, but maybe a bit bigger and cross-dimensional. There’s room for everyone somehow, but it’s also nice and cosy and you can have a cup of tea. We do our best with this particular space.
To get started, I’d love it if you could just introduce yourself and explain what work you do.
Andy Field:
My name’s Andy. I have been working in and around the area of whatever we want to call it, for probably nearly 20 years.
In that time, I’ve done various different things. Very early on in my career, I did a lot of making pervasive games, out on the streets of cities and such like, for adults and in cinemas and various places.
I made interactive theatre shows for a little while, although they were relatively unsuccessful.
With my friends Deborah Pearson and Ira Brand I am the co-director of an organisation called Forest Fringe, which is a collective of interesting performance-based artists. It’s maybe most well known for running a DIY venue at the Edinburgh Festival each summer, but also did its micro-festivals across the UK and internationally, and hosted residences, and created new commissions, and all sorts of things.
And most recently, for about the last 13 years, I have been collaborating with my partner, Beckie Darlington, to create work with young people. What we say about the work that we currently do is that it’s about enabling young people to be part of the civic discourse of their communities. Giving young people a platform and a space in which they can be part of those big conversations, on their own terms.
A lot of our work is about working very closely with lots and lots of different kinds of young people to create art projects that are primarily, I suppose, for an adult audience and quite often for involving the engagement of civic leaders, policymakers, and people like that.
Voidspace:
That’s interesting.
Andy Field:
We’ve done all sorts of things in that context. We started off making interactive performances, but we’ve also, more recently, made books, films, exhibitions, and all sorts of things.
Around that and alongside all of that, I am a writer. I used to write very obnoxious articles for The Guardian when I was probably too young to really understand that that was not necessarily a great thing to do.
Voidspace:
That’s the age that everyone writes obnoxious articles. You look back at that stuff and you just think, “Yeah, there’s a young person with opinions.” That’s okay.
Andy Field:
As a young person I was very sure of my ideas about the world.
But also, I more recently co-wrote a book about contemporary performance with my friend Maddie Costa. And even more recently, I wrote Encounterism, a book that is actually not really about performance at all, but using interactive performance as a lens through which to consider our encounters with other ordinary people in our everyday lives. In places like cinemas, hairdressers, and elsewhere, like public parks.
Voidspace:
Pervasive games are definitely one of those things that I feel comes back into fashion every 20 years or so.
Andy Field:
I think I was primarily interested in the question of how you can use the format of a game to encourage people to reflect on, and maybe even re-imagine, their relationship to the people and spaces around them.
The thing I found about games that I really liked at that very early stage, or what I really liked about the audience of those gaming events, was how just up for it they were. This sort of game invites a particular mode of very active participation. It really encourages you to think about yourself as an active player within a scenario, and it was very easy to get people to do interesting stuff.
I made a game called Moveyhouse. I used to work a lot with a company called Hide and Seek, which is a really wonderful company run by Alex Fleetwood and Holly Gramazio. They were amazing. When I was very young and didn’t really have any experience, they gave me lots of opportunities to just do stuff at their various events.
There were people within their little community, within their world, who came very much from a gaming background and we’re really interested in the mechanics of games. I was the opposite, that I came from this more performance art, live art background, and was interested in the opportunity afforded by these very willing players to then create these quite interesting artistic scenarios.
At the same time, I was studying for a PhD, which was looking at the New York avant-garde performance movements of the ’60s and ’70s. I was looking at lots of things like happenings and event scores and Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, people like that. That was my way in.
I was thinking, a willing gaming audience is a bunch of people who have the same gung-ho enthusiasm to just do weird things out in public, like a bunch of hippies in the ’60s or ’70s were. I mean, hippies is probably not the right word: avant-garde New York students, and various acolytes around those kinds of movements. I would create these experiences, and it was always just really thrilling to me how quickly people were willing to throw themselves into it.
Voidspace:
Can you give me an example?
Andy Field:
Moveyhouse was very explicitly referencing a Claes Oldenburg piece, a happening event that he created in cinema in New York, in about 1962, or something like that. He created a piece in this cinema where he had the audience standing on one side of the cinema and performers on the other, following a series of randomised instructions that I think he’d handed to them on cards. They had people wearing Mickey Mouse ears. He was very interested in the circles of a Mickey Mouse ear and how they rhymed with the mechanical circles of the cinema projector and the mechanics of that.
I wanted to do a reenactment of the Moveyhouse at the ICA as part of an event that Hide and Seek were doing there. And they wouldn’t let me use the cinema because they were screening films there. So what I ended up doing was, rather than reenacting this old piece, I reenacted what was going on in the ICA cinema.
So, I had the seats up in the theatre to look like a cinema with a cinema screen in front of it. And I had someone create this very simple programme that allowed me to just write white text on a black background that would then just appear on the screen in front of people. I got a bunch of my friends to go and sit in the cinema at the ICA and subtly text back. This is pre-smartphone. It was probably about 2008, 2009. I started to then project texts onto the screen in the theatre and get people to reenact it. And it was nice.
But then I quite quickly then began to insert these fantastical or make believe elements. The things the audience were doing. So like coughing, coming in late, someone leaving, someone being told to stop texting on their phone. So various quite mundane little things. I did this in various places. Coughing was always a good one. It was very easy to cough. That’s the immediate invitation to be participating.
And then it just was improvised. It usually lasts about 20 minutes, and there was all this film music playing over the top. And it was just this active choreography with the audience. There’s no real win condition to it. There’s no game mechanism. It was just this little duet that I was performing with the audience. I’d say, “People are throwing popcorn around,” and then people would throw popcorn around.
Voidspace:
I love that.
Andy Field:
I had a table full of props at the front, and I had a Darth Vader mask because I was interested in this idea of thinking about the movement from the mechanical forms that Oldenburg was interested in – with the Mickey Mouse ears and the film projector – to the frictionless concealment of digital technology, and how that may be in this other iconic American silhouette of the Darth Vader mask.
There would become a point where someone would be wearing Mickey Mouse ears and someone else would be wearing this Darth Vader mask and they’d start chasing each other around this theatre. At the end, we’d get to dance in the aisles. It was really chaotic. It was wild. It was incredible.
Voidspace:
It sounds amazing.
Andy Field:
Then at the end, Holly, who was one of the organisers of the event at the ICA, said it was one of the most ingenious ends to anything that she’d seen, because you’d get this rousing film music to play, and you’d tell everyone to stand up and clap and cheer and hug each other.
Voidspace:
And I suppose, through suggestion you’re manifesting people having a really good time.
Andy Field:
It was really wonderful and moving. It was pretty wild. We did that in quite a lot of different places.
Voidspace:
What I love about that, just from your description, is how you’re shifting the focus.
You’ve got a space. You know what a cinema is when you walk through the door, and what your focus when you walk in is going to be. I’ve been thinking a lot about contracts and about what we expect, how we expect and agree to engage with different pieces of art and how, by gently subversing or interrogating those, you can do really cool stuff.
When you go into a cinema, you expect to be listening. I know you’ve done a whole chapter on this in Encounterism You’re expecting to be sitting in worship of the product on screen. That’s what you think you’re going to the cinema for.
But by shifting the focus onto the communal experience of being the audience in the cinema, you’re encouraging us to think, what does that mean? And by heightening that and just by taking away the reason that we’re all sensibly meant to be here in the first place, it’s almost distilling the experience of being an audience down to its purest form.
I love the fact that it’s turning up the volume on the cues that we give each other all the time.
Andy Field:
Yeah, that’s a really nice way of saying it.
I think what you’ve just described is exactly what I was interested in, gently turning up the volume on the social dynamics that powered our class of everyday lives.
Another piece that I made at the time was a piece called Checkpoint, which was more gamey, but still vague in terms of where you’re actually winning or losing at the end of it.
Voidspace:
I think something can be a game without having to win or lose, though.
Andy Field:
I’ve had some interesting conversations with game-related people about this, like what is play? What’s the game?
I think that probably my interest was in play and using that as a way to turn up the volume on this barely visible network of social relations that make up our experience of everyday life.
In Checkpoint, I would build a living room set in a public place, and the players of the game would have to dismantle that living room and reconstruct it on the other side of this public place, by smuggling it past a team of border guards who were out to try and spot people who were playing the game and prevent them. They would check them and take anything off them that they should have been carrying.
The thing I was interested in with it was the idea of ordinary. The way that you played the game, therefore, was by pretending that you weren’t playing the game. That you were just an ordinary man who was walking through this square, because anyone that looked too conspicuous would be pulled up. You just happen to have a giant standard lamp about your person. And a sofa.
The thing I was interested in with that game in particular was the idea of ordinary people pretending to be ordinary people. That double consciousness was what that did to your understanding of the way in which you’re always already performing in public.
Voidspace:
I think three of the most terrifying words in human language are “just act natural.”
Andy Field:
I agree. And that’s what the game was all about.
We did a version of it in the Shunt Vaults one time, and there was a guy who I didn’t even realise was playing the game, who just found from behind the bar or borrowed a box of beers, and spent the whole night just walking backwards and forwards like he was restocking the bar.
Inside his little box, he was taking a piece of the living room backwards and forwards over and over again. No one stopped him. I don’t even know what he was doing, what subtle cues that he was using, but he somehow managed to so perfectly embody the character of a person restocking a bar that it went completely unquestioned for the entire evening.
Voidspace:
That is amazing. It’s like capture the flag in reverse. Because you’re trying to put something there. I just love the fact that it’s a living room, that it’s so incongruously domestic and ordinary. I suppose it wouldn’t work if you were trying to smuggle a replica of the Crown Jewels, would it?
The idea that the aim of this is just to quietly, sneakily, create something, there’s something nice about it.
Andy Field:
Practically, it had to be something that had lots of small pieces that you could have some fun with.
I would often have a plate with food on it. How do you move a plate full of food in a concealed way?
On the larger versions of it, I’d have an actual person asleep in the installation. How would you do that? How would you move a big chair or a comfy sofa or whatever?
The other thing that was the inspiration for the game was visiting the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin, and thinking about the ingenious ways people have found of smuggling people from one side of the city to the other.
Thinking about resistance as an artistic medium or resistance as an artistic practice. I guess the living room was about this texture of domesticity. You’re trying to take a life and shrink it down and transplant it to somewhere else. That amidst this game and these security guards with mirrored sunglasses and all of this, there is this thread, this texture of domesticity that sits underneath it and grounds it in something.
I was always interested in the idea of these game structures, and trying to give them these textures that give them the unpredictable, or the layers and textures that create what might amount to an artistic experience as well as a game experience.
Voidspace:
This is a conversation I’ve been having a lot with myself as a curator – trying to work out what games or playable art I want to include in the festival. Thinking, what makes this something that I want to exhibit as an example?
Saying that one thing is art and one thing is not art is also probably a bit problematic. But I suppose it’s about thinking, “Well, what does this communicate outside of just the mechanics? Does this communicate something in addition to wanting to win or lose or play that way?”
Andy Field:
I think that’s it. Actually, lots of games do that. Things that are really games, like Dungeons & Dragons.
Voidspace:
Dungeons & Dragons is just, for me, one of the purest forms of collective storytelling. There are your structures and your props to support you in doing that, and D&D, the props and structures are the dice and the rules.
Then there’s a whole conversation about different types of TTRPGs and what stories the rule system encourages. I would say that those role-playing games are much more about the act of play itself.
I was thinking about The Stolen Child, the very simple pervasive game using playing cards that I showed at Voidspace Live 2025 this year. It probably wasn’t making any artistic statement beyond, “this is a fun game to play together”. But what it was doing in the context of an event that’s very markedly community-focused, it was punctuating the space with spots of commotion and chaos, and in the moment community building. Choreographically, it was bigger than the sum of its parts because of the space that it occupied in the wider event.
I suspect that’s probably true with a lot of those pieces for you as well. How they were fitting into the the whole as well as being standalone pieces.
I love how your early work was bringing in the legacy, or awareness, of those performance happenings and movements from the 1960s and 1970s.
Andy Field:
It’s interesting what you’re saying about the interpersonal, because the subject of my PhD was about the way in which a memory, like an informal, fleshy memory of those earlier works might exist today as a set of strategies for navigating urban space.
The idea was to try and take the memory of that work and separate it from the legitimised vision, to separate it from the memory, from the institutionalised memory of that piece, which often has to do with intellectual property and the visual orientation of art museums that have appropriated the role of the designated institutional memory of these pieces, that were not really visual art, right?
They were actually these fragile, complex performance events that happened. And a couple of photographs were taken of them at the time, and now those photographs become the pre-eminent existing memory of that.
Voidspace:
That is so true.
Andy Field:
I was looking at an academic who’s name I think is Rebecca Schneider, who talks a lot about reenactment, and about reenactment as a form of fleshy history.
She worked with people like American Civil War reenactors. She’s talking about the idea of a memory that is intangible and unreliable and that exists within actions and movements of people.
And this is another form of history that captures something that is not captured by that more legitimised and verifiable institutional history. I was trying to borrow some of the ideas from that. To think about the idea that, within a contemporary game making and interactive performance, there can be another memory of this work that is to do with audiences, rather than to do with the artists and their carefully curated vision of what these events that they did many years ago were and meant.
Voidspace:
There’s something about the fact that even though there are different ways of experiencing time, either through theatrical abstraction or static cuts or whatever, the experience that you’re getting in a live performance is an experience that can only exist in the moment in time that it’s happening.
And so trying the minute you step away from it and turn it into a static photograph, you’re already looking back at it and turning it into something else.
I’m a big fan of reenactment as a way of re-experiencing.There’s something about wearing those materials and doing those things. When I was a historical reenactor, all day we would be focussed on creating a scene that was “authentic” from a historical perspective. But actually, the time after the show – Wimples off! – when you could wear your normal clothes again and crack open a beer around the campfire, that – the way the communities that gathered around those campfires functioned – was every bit as true to the authenticity of the experience, in a way.
Andy Field:
That’s really interesting to me. I think that what I was trying to get at in my PhD was exactly what you’re saying about the sense that the fire contains a meaningful, if intangible, but important form of historical memory.
That sitting around the fire in your normal clothes and doing whatever, there’s something about that social dynamic, that relationship with you and the fire, the relationship with having done something previously, the intangible sense of a relationship to those particular textures and qualities of the historical experience. It contains something that is perhaps even more meaningful than making sure that the jerkin is absolutely with the right weave and the right colours, right?
Voidspace:
Exactly.
Andy Field:
What I was trying to do was say that it was to try and imagine a form of reenactment that is not about recreating exactly what happened. Partly, it is because a performance, any performance, is about much more than you can ever contain within a reenactment.
It’s about exactly as you were just saying, it’s about where did you come from that morning? What was on your mind? I think that is true, the audience are the co-creators of a work, even if that work is quite conventional in its form. What are those people bringing to it? What did the air feel like on the morning that you were walking? What was on the radio that day? You cannot possibly attempt to recreate in the granular detail the experience of that thing.
You’re looking instead for something other than authenticity in that sense. You’re looking for what are these strategies, these social dynamics, these social relationships that might persist, perhaps, as particular ways of moving, particular ways of interacting to other people? How do you try and create something that can summon or honour a particular set of actions or movements or interactions, something that’s trying to shape itself around that more fleshy, abstract notion of history than that material detail.
Voidspace:
I think of it as how can we experience history from the inside out rather than outside in? You’re creating the conditions to feel the same things that you would be feeling. Around that campfire, we would have the stories. There are things that get woven into the story of the group and the story of the community.
I thought there was something really interesting in the patterns of storytelling and oral culture and all of the sense of commonality, and I think probably what a lot of people were looking for when they looked back nostalgically to the idea of the Mead Hall is actually that exact feeling. Maybe for you, when you were trying to recreate the happenings of the 60s, there was something in the way that it presumably felt.
I like the way you talk about the texture of it, because I think of it in terms of story, but that’s probably because I’m quite narratively inclined.
Andy Field:
It’s a historical echo rather than a reenactment.
One of the pieces that I created, one of my reenactments for the PhD was of a piece that Claes Oldenburg made called The Store, which was where he created this imaginary store in the Lower East Side of New York in the early ’60s.
It was in a storefront on a street, but he was selling these crude papier-machet reconstructions of everyday objects. It was very interesting because it would be very easy to just do the same thing to create a store and fill it with the actual pieces.
There’s something about the particular conditions, particularly the circumstances, and also the failures of that project that were also an intrinsic part of it. He was very pleased with himself about the fact that he wandered around this neighbourhood in his overalls, looking like anybody else there on the street. Any ordinary working class person on the Lower East Side. But none of the local people came into his store. They were like, “This is a weird fucking art thing. I’m not going in there.” Mainly, people were coming from these trendy Upper West Side gallerists who were coming down to go on almost like a safari to the really lower portion.
Voidspace:
How do you get these little trinkets and bring them back to their gallery?
Andy Field:
There’s a thing of being both inside and outside of a neighbourhood at the same time. In attempting to recreate that, I was thinking about, well, what’s my experience of my city, London, at the time?
It’s not about this London in the mid 2000s. You don’t have huge space for the city where you can just rent a shop unit for nothing because we’re already post-gentrification in most parts. My experience was much more mobile. It was about going from one far-out place to where you might live, to another, to a bridge venue somewhere else.
This is pre Uber, so I’d spend a lot of time in mini cabs and cycling around. I created a taxi service, basically, where I would take people from an out-of-the-way fringe theatre back to their home where they lived. It was an actual taxi service. It wasn’t an official taxi service because that would be illegal. But it was an art piece that also would do the thing that it said it would do. It would take you home.
As I drove you home in my little car, with a taxi sign on the top, you would be listening in the back seat to an audio piece. You’re actually moving through the city with the windows around down, looking out and things like that. You’re going from one place that you were back to your home, but you’re also outside of the city. You are absorbed within this audio world that, for me, was the equivalent of the abstract half-real object that he had in his story.
It was not so much about reenacting what happened as trying to shape yourself or reshape yourself around the echo of that piece.
Voidspace:
The echo of the essence of it.
Andy Field:
What you talked about your history, fireside weaving of real stories, and stories from your real life, and stories from the battlefield, and things that are and aren’t. Embrace a more intangible version of history.
Voidspace:
I like the idea of that meeting between the tangible and the intangible, between the concrete and the abstract. There’s a few I can see echoes of that in a lot of different things you’ve done.
I wanted to talk about Paper Stages. The festival that is also a book, or the book that is also a festival.
Andy Field:
Paper Stages was actually, initially, a response to a very specific set of material conditions that we at Forest Fringe found ourselves in.
The venue that we used for the first years of the organisation, from 2007 to 2011, had been sold to somebody, and we were in the process of looking for a new venue so that we could continue. But in 2012, we did not have a venue. We wanted to have a presence, some presence at the Edinburgh Festival that year. We’d started to explore these playful small commissions for artists to do various things.
We did a project called the Zero Hour Bus Tours, which was a series of audio experiences on night buses through London. We commissioned different people to make performances that happened on or around night buses as they travel between Chelsea and Liverpool Street.
Voidspace:
Oh, incredible.
Andy Field:
We started to think about different little playful invitations to artists. We had this idea of creating a book where each double page in the book was an invitation to an artist to create a performance, and they could choose to interpret that in any way they wanted.
Some people created literally a script that could be read. There was one that was a duet for a performer and household appliances. There was one that was an audio piece that gave you a link to download an audio piece and then to go to a particular place in Edinburgh and listen to that audio piece.
I created a series of little event scores for performances that you could look for around Edinburgh. The idea was you could go and perform them in the places where I suggested you could perform them. The Incidental Plays is what they were called, because the idea was to create these performances that people wouldn’t realise were performances.
But you could also simply imagine their presence. That was something that was, I think, very interesting to me at the time, the idea of an imagined performance, which is not exactly the same as a fictional story, but is also not the same as an actual embodied performance.
The thing that I found really interesting about Paper Stages was that through the different invitations and the different performances people created for it, a recurrent theme that emerged quite accidentally was to do with solitude. It made me aware that solitude is the one thing that live performance finds very hard to explore because it is almost by its nature a communal experience, even if the people communing are one performer and one audience member.
What this format offered became, I think, quite accidentally, a meditation on the question of solitude. It was a bit like a magic eye picture or something. Once you’ve seen it, you can unsee it as it treaded its way, invisible through the different pieces.
So for example idea of a duet for one person and the household appliances. On one level, it’s funny and charming, and you get to do silly things with vacuum cleaners and things. But there’s a real solitude in this idea of a duet with no-one, and of making music with these household appliances. The solitude of the domestic space became very apparent within that. You’re in a shower, you’re vacuuming on your own.
Or a piece where you’re at Arthur’s seat on your own, a piece that invites you to walk on your own and think about it, where for most of that walk, you’re not even listening to a performer or a piece of music or anything. You’re just walking. Or Gemma Brockis’ piece also was a script for a duet between you and Gemma, but where she never replies. So it’s really just one person speaking into the void.
So, for me, the thing that I found most interesting about it was this way in which it created all these different opportunities to explore solitude through a performative lens.
Voidspace:
That makes sense, that heightening experience, again, through that mediation. The thing that you need from your participant is to put themselves, even if you’re not actually going to Arthur’s seat, maybe you can’t, there’s still something about the act of putting yourself into that space.
Andy Field:
I guess for me, it’s about where does the artwork exist? Where can you locate the artwork? This idea that any given artwork is this myriad manifestations within each audience member or person that engages with it. There are some pieces that choose to amplify that sense of fracture and multiplicity, either through embracing elements that are different every single night, or by making the edges of the piece blur in unpredictable ways into reality so that your fondest memories of it are often things that sit beyond the control of the creator.
I guess that there are always centrifugal forces in any artistic event. There is a force that is pushing outwards that is fracturing, multiplying the experience of that thing, making it fracture outwards into each individual person’s experience and making an event or an experience or an artistic thing feel very diffuse and blurry and multifarious.
Then at the same time, there are these centripetal forces that are trying to hold together and try to pull everything back in. You need some of that force because otherwise something becomes completely diffuse and unreadable. But also, some of those forces are maybe things that we would want to resist a little. They’re ideas about, as we said, intellectual property and authorship and legitimacy. And also criticism fits into that as well. What is the legitimate reading or interpretation of this piece?
I think that any artistic experience is navigating the relationship between those things. An artist is always putting their thumb on the scales.
An obvious example would be publishing a playscript. That’s a force that is pulling everything back towards authorship, towards a single idea of where the centre of this piece lies. If you go to the Royal Court Theatre and you can buy a copy of the play that you are about to see, or if you’re a critic and you go and they give you a copy of the play as you’re going into it. These are forces that are saying, “Well, the centre of your experience is this thing that is unchanging, and you will see tonight one manifestation of it.”
And the choice for that to happen, the deeply subjective way in which you experience that piece and the wildly unpredictable spaces in which you experience it, they are that centrifugal force. They are pushing things out towards an experience that cannot be repeated, that is fractured and distinctive and diffused amongst every single person who has experienced it and experienced it in slightly different ways and noticed slightly different things. Even what I was glibly saying about playscripts and such, that’s not necessarily a criticism.
There’s actually something really beautiful and democratic about a playscript when viewed in another way. By that, it is also a playscript that is a real centrifugal thing because it’s saying, “Here are some words that I’ve written.” Here’s a story. Then anyone, anywhere, can now go and make their own version of it. I don’t have any connection to it whatsoever.
Actually, in a way, that diffuses that script, those words, much further than an artist like me. It’s taking it much further than I ever could in some ways.
When you’re younger, you have definite black and white ideas about what is good and what is bad. I think that as you get older, everything’s on a continuum. Really, you’ve got these different forces. As an artist or thinking of it from an artist’s perspective, you’ve got things that are taking the piece away from you, the moment that it hits contact with the world. You’ve got these forces that you and critics and institutions are pulling it back to as a centralised, singular version of what that artwork is.
We’re all, everybody, whether you’re a playwright at the Royal Court or you’re an artist who’s making games, or you’re Fiona Templeton and you’re making a series of monologues out in the streets of the city. Everyone’s negotiating these competing contrasting network of forces that are acting upon this thing that they’ve made, and you’re also doing it in your own idiosyncratic way.
It’s interesting to think about how we’re all just navigating our way through these things that take the work away from you, that diffuse it, that pluralise it, that send it out into the ether. These are the forces that are drawing it back to you, that are foregrounding your authorship, your control, your vision of what it is that you’re creating.
Voidspace:
The chapter of Encounterism that really has stuck with me was the one about public parks. The thing about parks, I thought was really interesting is that it’s an arena of action. The way that public spaces are being created today means in the space where you have a series of paths that you are allowed to walk on and benches that you’re allowed to sit on and play areas that you’re allowed to play in, but very little freedom of action.
It’s something that I just picked out that you were saying about the freedom that certain spaces give people to write their own stories as well, in parks and clubs.
Andy Field:
To me, it feels almost like it’s partly about a lack of trust, isn’t it?
I think the same is true for children, right? There’s the joke that people always make about children and how they open their Christmas presents and then they play with the box. Because the toy that really has one use. One function.
So course they want to play with a box because a box isn’t telling you how to play with it. A box is inviting you to be the author of your own experience.
I think it is something that all of us, children in particular, we have that freedom of play. I think that can be applied to public parks in that way.
Voidspace:
I also think it’s a capitalism thing, isn’t it? Because if you have a single-use toy, you need to buy more of them.
If you’re being kept moving, you’re going to probably buy more coffee just to have somewhere that you’re allowed to go and sit.
If you’re being directed in a certain way, you’re probably going to spend more.
Andy Field:
I do think a lot of it comes down to control. We exist within a capitalist system that increasingly really wants us to do nothing but consume. Within that society, things are becoming more and more unequal. More and more people are being marginalised and discarded. And so there’s this fear of what they might do if you leave them to their own devices.
You’re trying to find ways to eliminate any friction from everyday experience. And so you’re moving people as seamlessly as you can from one predetermined activity to another, rather than requiring the open space that lets people maybe do things that are unpredictable and potentially sometimes combustible.
I guess it’s almost this Foucaultian thing, right? That desire for control is not demonstrated through these expressions of overwhelming force and acts of like that. It’s more about these kinds of quiet surveillance. About the training of people. People are still aware of the constraints that are acting upon them, even in the sense where you perhaps weren’t aware of them.
Voidspace:
As you were saying before, the interplay between centrifugal and centripetal, or the tension between the unpredictable and the tightly structured.
I think it’s interesting to think about how those forces are at play in the wider world.
Is there any advice that you’d offer people who are beginning of their creative journey?
Andy Field:
I guess one thing that I’ve often noticed is how little you need to do to create something very powerful, especially when you are doing things that are interactive or that are happening in public space.
I think that some of the most beautiful things that I’ve experienced are just these pieces that have this simplicity. That are not trying to be everything all at once, but are actually about these subtle shifts in experience.
The thing that I thought of immediately was a piece by an artist called Greg Wohead that’s called Hurtling, which involves you sat on a rooftop with a tape deck in front of you, and you listen to some things on a tape deck, and do some of the bits and pieces. But really, the primary thing in the piece is this moment of connection between you and Greg over a very long distance. And it is such a small, simple piece, but really, really beautiful.
I guess what I’m saying is start small, especially when working in these areas. Start with something very small that doesn’t attempt to be spectacular or outlandish or huge. It doesn’t have to be Punchdrunk!
I think even something very small can have a very transformative experience. Because all of what we’re talking about is about work that exists in its relationship with the people who are experiencing it, who are encountering it.
You gain experience by learning how people respond to something you do. Rather than spending months and months and months building up something and only then launching a world, I think maybe you’re better off just slowly building, creating these very small experiences that give you lots of opportunity to meet with an audience.
Voidspace:
Beautiful. Thank you so much, Andy.
Andy Field’s latest book, Encounterism is out now. Buy it here and in all good book shops.