METHODOLOGY
Methodology
Deliberate, standards-based, traceable, and built to be understood by those who come after. That is the whole method; five principles unfold it, and each changes what the practice does on an ordinary Tuesday.
The five principles
01
Ephemeral art and documentation are one discipline
The earliest tools of a project — its research, its workflows, its data structures — already determine what can be preserved at its end. A model precise enough to fabricate from is a preservation object; a database organized for the run is an archive in waiting. The negative form is just as operational: documentation outsourced to strangers at the end of a process loses the information that cannot be bought back: intent. The practice therefore refuses the industry’s default sequence, in which documentation begins when creation ends. It builds no production system without asking what that system will export, and treats every early structural choice as an archival choice. The design of live and spatial work, and the documentation of that work, belong to the same discipline.
02
Standards are a form of respect
The practice works to international standards — IASA for the audiovisual, OAIS for the archival package, ISO and BIM protocols for models and information management — and understands the choice ethically before technically. A standard is accumulated professional judgment about how to handle other people’s work responsibly; adopting one is a promise that what the practice documents will remain legible, accessible, and correctly attributed long after its involvement ends. There is a commercial corollary: standards make deliverables portable, so no client is locked into the practice’s tools, formats, or continued existence. And there is a daily test: for every deliverable, the practice can answer to what standard, and why.
03
Heritage is a present responsibility
Under UNESCO’s 2003 Convention, the performing arts are intangible cultural heritage — as much a part of the human record as any monument or object, with documentation named among the measures that safeguard them. Giving live work less care than a building or a painting is a choice, not a fate. The operational edge: preservation obligations are raised in a project’s first conversation, never discovered near its last, and ordinary production decisions — a file format, a naming scheme, a capture date — are treated as heritage decisions.
04
Rights are addressed in parallel, not after
Every recorded performance is one object with many authors, and a record that cannot lawfully be used has not been preserved in any sense that matters. Rights clearance is therefore treated as documentation, not as a legal step that follows it: rights are mapped when the documentation is planned, clearances are gathered while contributors are present and reachable, and the rights record travels inside the archival package rather than in a drawer somewhere else. A preservation master without complete rights documentation is a file that cannot be used; we do not produce those.
05
Legibility outlasts us
Everything the practice makes — systems, models, databases, documents — will one day be read by someone with no access to its makers. Every deliverable is therefore tested against the reader who was never in the room. Self-describing structures, documented conventions, and open, durable formats are preferred on principle; anything that depends on the practice’s availability to explain itself is treated as unfinished. Legibility is the quality that distinguishes useful work from merely finished work.
The standards framework
The canon is identity, not apparatus: four families are named publicly, and each governs a different layer of the practice.
UNESCO 2003 CONVENTION
The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage; the performing arts are among its named domains, documentation among its safeguarding measures.
GOVERNS
The ethical and policy layer: why live work is heritage, and why documenting it is a recognized public responsibility.
OAIS — ISO 14721
The Open Archival Information System reference model, the international standard architecture for long-term digital preservation.
GOVERNS
The archival layer: how packages, metadata, and handover are structured so an institution can ingest deliverables as complete, self-describing archives.
IASA TECHNICAL GUIDELINES
The technical guidelines of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives — notably TC-04 (digital audio) and TC-06 (video).
GOVERNS
The audiovisual layer: capture formats, signal integrity, preservation masters versus access copies, audiovisual metadata.
BIM PROTOCOLS (ISO 19650)
Building Information Modeling standards, internationally framed by the ISO 19650 series on information management.
GOVERNS
The geometric layer: structured, data-rich models and drawings with disciplined naming, versioning, and exchange — fabrication-grade and archive-grade at once.
Beyond the canon lies the wider instrumentarium of archival description, preservation metadata, and packaging used by the memory institutions that receive the work; the practice adopts whatever a project’s destination requires. The commitment is a posture rather than a list: wherever accumulated professional judgment exists, the practice uses it instead of improvising a private alternative — because a private alternative, however clever, is what a stranger in fifty years cannot be expected to understand.
Working together
The first conversation
Every project begins the same way: with a conversation about scope, standards, and the preservation obligations the work will eventually carry. The question list is short and revealing:
What is this work?
What of it must survive, and for whom?
To which standards, under whose rights, into which archive?
What will funders, tours, and future revivals require of the record?
Asked at the start, these questions shape a plan; asked at the end, they compose an apology.
Two entry points, one arc
Embedded from concept. The practice joins the client’s process at first concept research and stays through delivery: researching the work, building its documentation framework, drawing and modeling it as it takes shape, running its data systems. Nothing of the artwork is the practice’s design; the work is documented while it is being designed, and preservation is inherited rather than added.
Engaged for capture. Projects that arrive closer to performance are served by the same method on a compressed arc. The decisive variable is time: engaged before capture is scheduled, the practice can plan the pipeline around the specific production; engaged later, documentation shades toward salvage. Even salvage is done to standard — capture, rights, data, and handover all run by the same rules.
The native mode is the full arc: from a client’s first concept research to long-term preservation, the configuration in which the record emerges shaped from the beginning by the thinking that produced the work.
The handover
What a client receives varies by configuration; the character of the handover never does: complete, structured, standards-aligned, rights-cleared, and legible with no one from the practice in the room. The practice grades itself by the inheritor’s test — the next operator can run the show, the next venue can rebuild the set, the archive can ingest the package without a phone call, and the researcher fifty years out can understand what the work was.