Access Protocol

A set of conditions that determines who may approach the work, when, how, and under what terms. Access Protocol describes the structure of entry: who is allowed to look, interpret, respond, or participate, and what relation has been agreed in advance.

The problem begins when someone assumes access they have not been given.

Ambivalent Closeness

Wanting closeness while hesitating over what it asks of me. I can want an intense connection with someone without wanting to know every detail of their life. That desire can include a wish to possess them, even while much of their separate life remains outside my attention.

The closeness can be real while my understanding remains partial. My photographs and the stories around them let me return to that gap.

Related account: Dim-Sightedness

Archival Impulse

The drive to collect, preserve, arrange, and re-read traces: images, screenshots, dates, sequences, fragments, old texts, failed attempts, unfinished bodies of work.

The archive is not a neutral storage space. It is a site of memory, selection, desire, and power. It decides what remains available for future reading.
Related: How to Be Seen Quickly, Mycophobia, No Direct Route

Beauty of Error

A form of beauty produced by slip, damage, mismatch, failure, or instability. An error can make an image more vulnerable, more alive, and more emotionally precise than a polished result.

Broken Surface

A surface that no longer behaves like a clean skin. It is interrupted, scratched, glitched, blurred, badly translated, over-compressed, uneven.

A broken surface lets the image feel mortal, touched, unstable, and closer to lived experience.
Related: Digital Expressionism, Mycophobia

Close Your Eyes

A survival mode: shut your eyes and jump. Move first, and only respond when something actually hurts. This mode can feel brave, intuitive, alive, even efficient. It avoids paralysis.

It also means accepting preventable injury as part of movement. Close Your Eyes trusts impact more than preparation.

Contract Logic

A model of contact based on procedure, consent, and declared conditions. Contract Logic does not make the encounter cold. It makes the encounter possible without pretending that every viewer enters from the same position.

The contract can be symbolic, theatrical, or ritualised. Its function is to name the audience, mark the threshold, and make clear that looking is also a form of participation.

The Cycle

Exoskeleton, release, impact, rage, guilt, repetition. This sequence describes a recurring structure: pressure builds, an external support makes action possible, the material goes public, the world answers, rage protects the territory, guilt follows, and the cycle waits to begin again.

Damaged Form

A form that has lost technical purity but gained intensity. Damage here is not always an accident. Sometimes it is the shortest road to emotional precision.

A damaged form can carry fear, embarrassment, urgency, tenderness, or excess better than a finished one.
Related: Chaos Under Construction, Light as Interference

Dim-Sightedness

Seeing enough to form a confident impression while leaving much of a person or place unexamined. I recognise this in my own habits: a familiar route begins to stand for a whole neighbourhood; closeness can feel complete while my knowledge of the other person remains partial.

Looking back at my blurred photographs, I recognise this way of moving through the world. Dim-Sightedness names a photographic project and one of the main threads of my practice. The term keeps my own certainty in view, along with what the image leaves indistinct.

Related work: Dim-Sightedness · Acid Abersoch Aberdaren

Displayability

Displayability names the passage from producing material to recognising, selecting, structuring, explaining, and publicly claiming it as a work. For years I made images and objects in great quantities, yet production alone did not give them a form in which I wanted to show them, speak about them, or stand beside them. The issue was never only whether an object could be placed on a wall.

For me, explanation is one of the ways a work becomes precise. Speaking, writing, sequencing, and classification can help the work take form; they do not make it less artistic. Displayability continues after installation in my willingness to remain near the work, answer questions, and take part in its public encounter. Completing No Direct Route changed the status of the term: it is no longer the central test of my current practice, but it still helps me distinguish between produced material, a formulated idea, and a work I am ready to present.
Related: Private Evenings, Mycophobia, No Direct Route

Double Bind

A structure in which two incompatible demands or labels are imposed at once, and any attempt to satisfy one immediately confirms the other. Too demonstrative and not serious enough. Too explicit and not honest enough. Too feminine and too aggressive.

The way out is to refuse the demand for simplification. To let the contradiction belong to the viewer rather than resolving it for them.

Empty Opening

The exhibition no one came to. Empty Opening condenses the fear that indifference is worse than hostility. Hostility at least confirms contact. Emptiness suggests that nothing happened.

It is the fantasy of public non-existence: no crowd, no witness, no friction, no social confirmation that the work entered the world for others.

The Erofeev Principle

Named after Venedikt Erofeev as a figure who could appear at once as genius and drunk, philosopher and clown, saint and sinner, without resolving the contradiction into a neat identity.

The Erofeev Principle rejects the demand to become one coherent label for the comfort of others. It accepts inhabited contradiction. I do not need to become singular in order to become legible.

Exoskeleton

Anything that temporarily removes inhibition and produces a sense of invincibility, permission, speed, or expanded capacity. Substances, music, rhythm, role-play, acceleration, erotic charge, social momentum, a scene, an atmosphere.

An exoskeleton can support action, speech, display, or risk. It is external and costly. It does not solve vulnerability; it suspends it for a while.

Fast Reading

An interpretation that arrives quickly and begins to stand in for further attention. A photograph is labelled provocative, erotic, damaged or unserious, and the label settles what it seems to mean.

I recognise a related habit in myself: I can know little about a person or place and still feel certain of my judgement. Dim-Sightedness brings this confidence into the account, including the moments when familiarity is mistaken for knowledge.

Related work: Dim-Sightedness

Freedom Territory

A place, scene, atmosphere, or temporary arrangement in which ordinary restraint loosens and other forms of speech, display, or conduct become possible.

A Freedom Territory is local and conditional. It might be a beach, a party, a platform, a private archive, a room with music, or a scene where the sentence “this is allowed” becomes believable for a while.

Fright Threshold

The point where looking becomes slightly difficult. It is not horror exactly. More like: I do not fully want to see this, but I also cannot stop looking.

A lot of strong images live exactly there.

The Little House

A space in which I host the encounter with the work. It can take the form of an apartment, an exhibition, a book or a website. I choose what enters, how it is arranged and the conditions in which it meets an audience.

This idea now has a practical continuation in my Private Evenings. I read aloud, show photographs and test sequences with a small audience. What happens in the room can change the form of the work.

Related work: Private Evenings

Marginal

The most painful label in the system. Marginal means being placed outside recognised value: outside seriousness, legitimacy, centrality, and symbolic worth.

It hits harder than more superficial criticism because it threatens value itself. It presses on the fear of structural dispensability.

Moral Intensity

How people choose what to fight for, and what fighting gives them. Moral Intensity is not only the ethics of an issue. It is also the emotional economy around it: belonging, adrenaline, purity, permission, shame, and the relief of having a clear enemy.
Related: Moral Intensity, The Force of Good, War Worm

Narrative as Medium

Narrative is material. It can take the form of a sequence, an explanation, a caption, an essay, a voice, an interview, or a story that organises what an image becomes and how it is understood. It may explain an image, repeat it, extend it, contradict it, or place it inside a larger structure.

Explanation is one of these operations and can be as deliberate and structurally necessary as contradiction or ambiguity. I use narrative as one of the ways a work is made and held together.
Related: Bird Market, Private Evenings, No Direct Route

Narrative Cover

A narrative surface that allows more dangerous or fragile material to enter public space without appearing in its raw form at once. Narrative Cover is tactical shelter, not falsification.

Narrative Filter

The voice, structure, or story-layer through which difficult material is made bearable, legible, or public. A filter does not simply hide. It changes the terms of encounter.

Oversharing

Showing more than is strictly necessary as a defensive strategy. If I say it first, reveal it first, expose it first, then it cannot be used against me in the same way.

Oversharing can function as pre-emptive control. It protects, but it also exhausts. It may prevent humiliation in one register while producing overexposure in another.

Performance Drive

The need to hold the structure of contact through voice, rhythm, timing, story, and attention. Performance Drive is the force that makes narration feel natural: speaking becomes a way to build the room around the work.

Its risk is confusion between holding attention and proving the right to occupy space.

Radical Openness

Openness used as force, armour, and declaration. Radical Openness can feel powerful while the world stays quiet or responds predictably: silence, admiration, likes, curiosity.

The structure breaks when the world answers with a label, a claim, a moral reading, or a sense of ownership. Then what was exposed as strength returns as a point of attack.
Related: Radical Honesty

Splitting

A lived map of internal permissions and prohibitions. The ability to show one thing and not another, to tolerate one form of exposure and not a neighbouring one.

Splitting can function as a boundary map. It shows where the psyche permits visibility and where it still defends itself. In practice, splitting marks the uneven terrain on which a work becomes possible.

Territory

Territory is a primary unit of safety in my practice. A territory is a place, scene, platform, room, ritual, or social arrangement where certain gestures become possible and others remain impossible.

The question is rarely only who I am. The question is where this body, voice, image, or story is allowed to exist. Different territories produce different permissions.
Related: Limanchik, On Being Russian

Territory Control

The attempt to manage conditions rather than people. Territory Control lowers anxiety by making the rules of entry, visibility, distance, and response more explicit.

In artistic terms, it appears as containers, interfaces, thresholds, instructions, reading conditions, and controlled forms of publicness.

Trigger

The moment when someone breaks the access protocol. A trigger is the point at which another person takes interpretive rights they do not have, imposes a reading without consent, moralises without invitation, or enters the work as if no threshold existed.

A trigger sets off a familiar cycle: aggression, withdrawal, and renewed attempts at control. It marks the moment when the encounter stops being structured and becomes invasive.