Methodology:
Site-integrity is an artistic research methodology that engages with collaborative and knowledge-led approaches to field research. By working in collaboration with site communities, the methodology facilitates the creation of artistic devices that articulate the material architectural, social, and institutional discourses present in site. This democratic approach to research encourages reflexive conversations that avoid reductive ethnographic portraits of people, transforming the ‘subject of research’ into the producer of their own voice.
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. Site-integrity serves a dual purpose: as a reflexive methodology for site users and as a facilitator for dialogue and scholarly exchange between multiple parties.