Inter/Actors: A Role of Participants

Participant Tracking: Clarifying the Roles of Interactors, Visitors, and Others

First it’s me, then to them. Why does this matter?
When I devise, I begin with what the place itself insists on: what it draws out from me. I notice what sensations and thoughts surface in my body — an image, a texture, a thought, an unease — then follow it. What matters, first and foremost, is to record that ‘event’ of the encounter, the way atmosphere and impulse take shape in real time. This is the material from which an activity emerges, one that feels true to the reality of that encounter. I might try to recreate the sensation, test it against reproduced conditions. I might try to reproduce conditions to observe what wasn’t there before, what changed in the place or in my own interaction. The activity ‘lands’ when it produces a significant effect on the narrative events that take place during the walk. They go untested by anyone but myself.

The act of composing these acts into the zine changes them. What they look like on paper, on screen in Indesign really, does not match the notes and voice recordings made to capture what will become the final act. The activities and the narrative shift into another register: the Interactor, the visitor, even I myself, stand at a kind of remove. Now the focus is shifting between page and interaction. The self-awareness is part of the process of developing the narrative – but does it ‘matter’ for subsequent readers, subsequent walkers. I ask myself this, each page, each step, each moment I capture a trace of the walk.

If these activities remain untested, what value do they carry?

What momentum, what legs, do they really have?

How does a method devised for self-development interface with wider concerns in social research, cultural studies, and heritage management?

When practice-led research leans into qualitative data management — methods shaped by the natural sciences —these questions remain persistent, distracting from the content itself. If the methods are untested, they cannot be reproduced. When the subjective impact of the researcher is not accounted for, centred really, the is risk sliding into a model of “weak objectivity.”

How much does the nature of difficult histories, contested heritage, or social conflict, require such subjectivities to illuminate? Or does allowing methods to go untested by a larger population sample, limiting how much content may be represented, flatten the complexities under scrutiny?

And how much do perceptions about the radicalising nature of contemporary feminist and queer thought influence perceptions regarding the validity of data collected in this manner?

This matters, this issue persists, because efforts to provide access and more equitable and engaging experiences with location, history, narrative seem to have gone unfulfilled, or at least, not rising to the desired potential. How then do we try again? What use do we have with methods like this?

Worried about the use, the need for agency, empowerment as a political device, social bonds … credentials and track records …

One of the project’s aims has become the management of expectations. My own expectations have shifted: away from the pursuit of definitive findings, toward an interest in what shifts when problems are approached against the grain, with new angels. I view “improvement” a measure to be cautious of and “purpose” as a means to generate new questions, new sensations, new ways of experiencing the encounter. The guardrail is caution towards ontological straw men that emphasise an imbalance of power, a legacy of violence to be reconciled and repaired, straw men that blur meaning to the point of distortion. Distortion isolates, it creates the kind of tension which does not encourage senses of belonging, shared interest and investment.

“Auntie, you read everything and say something completely impossible to believe—then get upset when people disagree, even though you know no one has or would read whatever it is you read that made you bust out with that statement …”

Previously, my expectation was to locate the problem and test whether it had been addressed by those who claimed or implied responsibility. For example, how did the Marshall Plan, partitions, decolonial projects, and other adjustments made in the 20th century actually impact the overall wellbeing of folx such initiatives aimed to achieve. Here, in this work, the plan was to hold FLINTA narratives against what was observed in situ, and through that juxtaposition, to measure accountability. What happens when FLINTA narratives are the centre instead of standard history. Now I resist that framework. I look to what happens when you transpose thought and ideas, blending local and imported, from one location to the next. I turn away from responsibility as the dominant lens – turning in the direction of re/sensitisation without a centre of power. How does what we feel, know, observe and understand interact with one another? How do we track that? How do we open up to that without making it only about well-being and self-development?

After three decades of working inside the politics of responsibility, my practice now insists on something different: a fidelity to what is felt, understood, and immediately present. A leaning toward authenticity. Toward encounters unmediated, even when they resist being systematised.

How does that translate across the skin, between distinct Others? How does that adapt to institutional settings so that the audience can grow in sustainable ways?.

I want to give a succinct answer as to what precisely the purpose of this research is in terms which make it apparent it is usable in other contexts, that new heritage/cultural management projects, education projects can develop using this model – not only why it matters, even if the subject involves things like history or social dynamics – but what role participant data has when the main participant tracked is the researcher themselves – figure out contrasting opinions on subjective and objective qualitative data collection and the use of something might be that designs its outputs for participant use without testing for them.

Thick description.

The impact of the work is never foreseeable; taking responsibility to our relations to our subjects – the suffering of ‘brute empiricism’ whose escapades render the zero-sum game true (the 1/0 problem). Curiosity leads us to subjects that teach more about our interests than those represented, but reading for that is not only against the grain, it must fight the current of ‘uselessness’. Wouldn’t it be better to angle in from the perspective that I/we/us/they possess internal capacity for transformation and self-determination? Showing how social worlds are dynamic, how the flow between external and internal forces is porous and careful observation shows that boundaries are experienced when forces are separated (are they?).

What is dialogical, what is a dialogue when this relationship between place, time, memory, thought, and feeling blends and blurs any clear lines between lived realities, a reductive ethnocentric view grounded in thick description, personal experience, and privileged ideologies …

Designing a practice for imagined participants may eschew some challenges and obstacles that render this data unusable. It also gives space and time to machinations of multiple more-than-human experiences that completely muddle a coherent narrative. And that might be a good thing if the experiment is to devise new methods that challenge straw people while at the same time keeping quality-of-life and quality-of-experience in reach.

I exercise great caution when I encounter paradigms that displace one for an/other—even when I resonate with the intention behind such movements and gestures. Comprehensive, tested participant data does not, is not, de facto accurate, responsible, accountable data—it’s in the analysis, in its tests-with-doing-things-with-words while actually doing things with your body and with places and with people, that we determine its usability.