mindful encounters is a research project in the visual arts by Honi Ryan. That’s me. I’m an interdisciplinary artist from from Australia and Germany, and I realised this project across three countries in 2013-2014 as artistic research for my international Masters of Fine Art in Creative Practice with the Transart Institute. It led to my thesis which was titled ‘Gestures of Intent: Performance art enacting peace through presence and participation’. You can check out my other work on my website. If I am to sum the project up:

It’s about generating questions, and putting positive personal action in the world.

With the pace at which our communication and forms of exchange are changing, it is useful to stop and reflect on them, mindfully, experientially. My work questions the changing nature of the ‘real-space’ encounter; how human to human contact is being effected in light of the digital shift. As many of our ‘needs’ for person to person contact diminish, what possibilities open up? After all, when anything becomes obsolete it opens itself up to new possibility, and that’s what we’re playing with.

Through mindful encounters, the idea is to throw the ‘real-space’ person to person encounter into the experimental realm, referencing the self reflective way we are able to respond to people and things in our online version of ourselves, and what that can have in common with ‘mindful’ practice in life. Mindful practice is implemented because of it’s relationship to peace propagation, and is looked at in the intersection of philosophy and science. Quite simply, it is defined here as awareness.