Accidental Gatherings vs Purposeful Gatherings

I want to explore accidental and purposeful gatherings within my work, and how buildings and places create the right environments for these different gatherings.

First I want to think about what kind of places people accidentally gather in in Jersey. Places where lots of people go at the same time, but not intentionally. For example at a bus station lots of people go there to get buses, but not everyone is there to catch the exact same bus. Compared to a concert, where people all buy tickets to go see the same thing at the exact same time.

Accidental Gatherings.

  • Bus Station
  • Beaches
  • Liberation Square
  • Royal Square
  • Millenium Park
  • Millbrook Park
  • Elephant Park
  • Restaurants
  • Cafes
  • Town
  • Fort Regent
  • Les Quennevais Sports Centre
  • Dual Carriageway
  • Supermarkets

Its quite a difficult time of the year for looking at Purposeful gatherings, because most of the Purposeful gatherings have already happened during Summer. E.g. Jersey live, Jersey Pride, Groove de Lecq etc.

Purposeful Gatherings

  • School/Work
  • Assemblies
  • Lunch Times (within school)
  • Ticketed events (Concerts/festivals/comedy shows)
  • Organised classes/activities/clubs
  • Organised events (weddings/parties etc)
  • Churches/religious places
  • Organised Family gatherings

Places that can be considered both Accidental and Purposeful gatherings

  • Planes/Ferries
  • Cinema
  • Viewing Rugby/Football club

It is slightly difficult to define exactly what is a purposeful gathering and an accidental gathering.

Even within accidental gatherings there will be smaller purposeful gatherings. For example when a small group of friends arrange to meet in a park, but there are other people there who they didn’t organise to meet with.

Also within Purposeful gatherings there can be accidental gatherings. E.g. When people buy tickets to a specific event, they know that other people will be there seeing the same thing at the same time, but they don’t know exactly who the people there are going to be, and so may bump into people they know (because this is Jersey and Jersey is small and you will always bump into people you know).

One thought on “Accidental Gatherings vs Purposeful Gatherings”

  1. You need to expand on this idea too by including research into artists references that we discusses e.g. Andrea Gursky, Massion Vitale and his use of Shift-Tilt technique, or miniature photography. Also do a blog post on the work by Melanie Manchot and her project Group and Locations. You also need to seriously begin to take more images and explore this in more depth!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *