Methodology
Drawing on Doreen Massey’s understanding of place as relational and evolving, site-integrity approaches filmmaking as a collaborative mode of spatial enquiry through which human, non-human and technological agencies co-produce knowledge. Building on Miwon Kwon’s paradigms of site-specificity—the phenomenological, the institutional and the discursive—site-integrity proposes a fourth paradigm: the performative. Within this framework, site is understood as an emergent and relational condition continually reconfigured through encounter, exchange and embodied forms of practice.
A distinctive feature of the methodology is the use of custom motorised recording and playback devices that facilitate a recursive exchange between filming and (re)presentation. Recorded material is returned to, and activated within, the locations where it was originally captured. In doing so, the device operates as an interface: a dynamic system of exchange. Rather than functioning as neutral recording tools, the devices operate as site-responsive systems whose movement and choreography emerge through negotiation with the material, spatial, social and political conditions of each environment. In this sense, site conditions themselves shape how the work is produced and encountered. By situating the viewer within a changing live space, there is never a point of fixed representation. Site-integrity repositions representation from its retrospective or projective dimensions towards that which is performed, embodied and experiential.
The methodology was first introduced in the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) in 2019 and further expanded in Scene, Volume 11, 2023). Site-integrity remains a working methodology: continually tested, reconfigured and extended through collective forms of encounter.