FIELD OFFICE Reactivated
Artifacts & Observations
FIELD OFFICE — Reactivation Post
Origin: FIELD OFFICE (Practice)
Post Type: Framing / Context
Date of Publication: 2025-12-16
Related Divisions: FIELD OFFICE, STUDIO, GEOCOG, ANGLING DIVISION
Purpose: Introduce archival artifact series and orient readers
Author: RYAN DEWEY
I’ve been quiet publicly for a while, but FIELD OFFICE has remained active, tracking landscapes, testing methods, and gathering observations across expeditions and research projects. Over the past several years, this work has accumulated into a body of artifacts: expedition logs, analytical slides, forensic landscape analysis, Blue Books, and ephemera studies.
One of the skills I rely on as an anthropologist is living with the data. To find the stories embedded in the information I collect during discovery and research, I need to process it, follow trails, tie up loose ends, and uncover the unifying organization within the apparent mess of notes. I’ve been building out ontologies, mapping semantic relations, and constructing conceptual models to make sense of it all within the practice. This is why I haven’t always opened my fieldnotes publicly; after the fieldwork, it is the work of understanding and structuring the data that has taken priority for me.
I’m starting to make some of that work available here. Artifacts will appear gradually, not necessarily in strict order, and each comes with context and metadata so you can understand what it represents and how it fits into the practice.
Publishing these artifacts is less about the date they were produced and more about sharing the work itself. Each piece reflects a step in FIELD OFFICE’s ongoing inquiry, whether it’s a slide from the Hexagon Quarry Analysis, a Blue Book documenting an exhibition, a technical report serving up quarry comparison, or a record of an expedition to study glacial formations.
My goal is to make these materials accessible and legible, so readers can see the reasoning, method, and observations that guide the unification of my practice. Narrative translation posts will follow, helping to connect artifacts across projects and divisions.
Over the next few weeks, you’ll encounter images, expedition logs, digital models, and ephemera studies, each artifact available on its own, each revealing part of the ongoing work of FIELD OFFICE. But you’ll also see some of the new projects I’ve begun which emerge out of the momentum generated by the research. I won’t bombard you, and the density will ebb and flow, sometimes like the tide, but most often like the meltwater at the edge of a glacier. More soon.
RYAN DEWEY