Structural Thoughts
- Could organise the archive not by medium but by site or encounter, with each entry being multimodal
- A single data point could be a walk + recording + object + painting + field note, all date and located, building a layered ‘stratigraphy’ over the project’s duration
- This would formally embody the intra-active framing rather than just describing it
Core Structure: Encounter as Unit
- Each entry sits under an ‘Encounter ID’ – date, time, site/ journey, duration
- All traces that encounter produces are aggregated underneath that ID
- Will stop the archive fragmenting into ‘output type’ siloes e.g. photo/ sound/ text
- Keeps a multimodal layering
- e.g.
Cutting across the encounters – organising axes
I’ll want to navigate the archive in multiple ways – relationally – depending on whether I am writing or making at any given moment, so instead of a fixed hierarchy, I’ll need independent axes.
1. Spatially, by site
- Using recurring locations as anchors
- e.g. The Stade, net huts, the old bathing pool, the Fire Hills, specific streets in the Old Town
- Each site becomes a ‘thread’ I can pull to see how I have encountered it repeatedly over time
- A stratigraphy of return
2. Conceptually, by theme
- Tagging each encounter against my thematic categories – e.g. presence/ absence, edge/ threshold, reciprocity, repetition, weather/ season, personal biography
- Encounters can carry multiple tags
- Relates the archive back to theoretical reading
- Interpretation comes after the fact, reflective, rather than forced and premature at the point of collection
3. Epistemic status, by register
- Distiguishing in-situ data (captured in the moment, pre-reflective) from afterward data (studio-made, reflective, mediate by memory)
- keep both separate to allow examine the gap between each as its own object of study
4. Chronologically and seasonally, by temporality
- Straightforward date order for tracking the project’s unfolding
- Cross-referenced by season/ tide/ light
- Hastings as a coastal town will likely show strong seasonal inflection
5. By collaborator status, degree of non-agency claimed
- A more experimental axis
- Did I make this, did the town “make” this (e.g tide-worn objects, wind effected recordings)
- Or is it genuinely co-produced (e.g. rubbings, photos where weather conditions determine the image)?
- Useful scaffolding for IP/ Authorship thinking
- Collaboration documentation could extend naturally to this archive
