The circumstances

Why this research exists

A note for anyone curious about where an archive like this comes from.

The proposal was to be the instrument of the study — to call into as much of the field as could be reached, then ask the people who built those works what they were doing. Between 8 and 25 July 2026 I was recovering from surgery: without sight for the first two weeks, on opioid analgesia, and in pain.

The loss of sight had been anticipated. My advisor identified it in advance as the research’s most embodied phase, and it was: for two weeks the telephone was not a chosen medium but the only one, and a form built entirely on voice met me exactly where I was. What none of us anticipated was that the medication would prevent me forming durable memory. I conducted two interviews inside that window and took part in a dozen phone experiences. I hold the recordings, the file metadata, the correspondence and a printed program carrying a contribution in my own name. I have no retained experience of any of it.

The rule that governs everything here. Nothing about that period is presented as recollection. Where the window is described, the source is a file, a timestamp, a recording or a document, and the record says which. Reconstructed material is marked as reconstructed. This is a rule and not a preference: a narrative smoothed over the gap would invalidate the finding.

That condition is why this archive grades every cell. Having lost the ability to rely on my own memory for eighteen days, I had to build a vocabulary for how each thing was known — experienced and retained, experienced and reconstructed from a timestamp, told to me by a maker, read in a listing, or guessed. That vocabulary turned out to be more useful to the field than it was to me, and it is now the spine of the database.

Two losses

The interview that was not recorded

Within the first days after surgery, fully amnesiac, I interviewed a practitioner in commercial phone-based intimate labor — the population my proposal identified as the most conspicuous absence in the experience design literature. I chose a masculine-presenting practitioner deliberately, wanting someone whose clientele might resemble me, and because he seemed kind. No recording survives, and I have never found one.

What I retained is the inverse of everything else here. Every other entry on this site is a file without an interior. This is an interior without a file.

RECONSTRUCTED TESTIMONY · UNRECORDED · JULY 2026 He said that it made him sad, sometimes, when a caller assigned him a role — asked him to be aggressive, to talk them through a sexual act — and then hung up the moment they had what they came for. Not unfriendly exactly. Just finished. Other callers rang to talk about ordinary things, and on those calls he did not feel he was playing a role at all. He wanted to be honest about who he was and how he presented himself, and believed he was. He also had to stay guarded: about his identity, his partner’s identity, and parts of his own life and family. He did not experience those two things as being in conflict.

This is reconstructed from memory and is marked as such wherever it appears. It is not a transcript and cannot be checked against one. It is also the single most direct answer anyone gave me to the question I set out with. He holds authenticity and protective concealment at the same time and does not find them contradictory — which sits directly against Parker Sela, who will not play a character at all, and Nicky Perfect, who becomes “Nicky the negotiator” in order to survive the call. Three practitioners, one axis, and the practitioner the field does not cite gives the most precise account of it.

The performance I had been waiting for

Candle House occasionally offers an unscheduled piece to its followers, free, called a slow dance. You send a song. The operator listens to it, reads the lyrics, calls you, and improvises a poem out of the song and whatever they know of you. I had wanted to experience this for a long time and had been waiting for a window when I would be free.

Interviewing Candle House’s artistic director on 27 July, I mentioned that I hoped one day to receive one. I learned in that moment that I already had.

I have since verified the timestamp from my own records: 9 July 2026, 7:51 PM. The day of my surgery. Of the four hundred and eight hours in that period, close to the single hour I was least capable of receiving anything or answering it. He could not have known that. He was being generous, and the generosity landed in the one place nothing could be kept.

It is described in my own interview notes from that conversation, in his words: the smallest skeleton he has ever worked from, no structure at all, someone provides a song. I have the note. I do not have the call.

Of everything in this period, this is the loss that has been hardest to hold, and it is also the most useful. The anticipation survived the event completely intact. That is a separation of anticipation from experience from retention that I would not have been able to produce deliberately, and it is the origin of Finding 07.

This account is published here with the company named. In any wider publication the company and the piece may be anonymized, at their discretion and not mine.