Methodology:
Site-integrity is an artistic research methodology that engages with collaborative and knowledge-led approaches to field research. By prioritising close collaborations with site communities, the methodology facilitates the creation of ethical, artistic devices that articulate the material architectural, social, and institutional discourses in site. The artistic device serves a dual purpose: as a reflexive tool for site users and as a facilitator for exchange and interaction.
With its roots in structural filmmaking, site-integrity 'performs' place by presenting recorded material back in the site where it was originally filmed, using bespoke motorised recording/playback devices. This enables an exact transfer of scale and time as the pre-recorded films map the architectural site as a kind of matching of the world with its representation. These artistic devices are used as creatures of autonomy, a source of possibility through which site materiality might be found and shared or a technological ability to access somewhere physically restricted.
Taking a non-representational position (Bolt, 2004), this research builds upon "place as emergent, relational and beyond representational regimes" (Massey, 2005). Positioning the viewer within a dynamic live setting creates an opportunity for audiences to experience their relationship and reading of the site. This avoids the controversial 'framing' of place and instead offers an experience in the 'here and now', in spatial extension and temporal duration. This focus on the present repositions the act of representation from its retrospective or projective dimension towards that which is experiential and reflexive.