STATION I: FIELD CHARGE
by Tim Brennan

FIELD CHARGE initiates the Stations of the Manoeuvre series not with argument, but with atmosphere. It opens a charged discursive field—where citation, memory, presence, and spatial thinking begin to take shape as method. Less a preface than a ritual threshold, this Station frames the manoeuvre’s conceptual and poetic ground.

The manoeuvre is introduced here not as a script or theatrical gesture, but as a mode of fielded, discursive performance. It is anti-drift, anti-psychogeographic, and antithetical to Situationist lineages. The world it addresses is not raw material but already inscribed—landscape as text, the exterior as a site of citation. Through the use of the guided walk-form, the ‘doing of history’ is gifted to the reader.

Drawing on a constellation of epigraphs and propositional fragments, FIELD CHARGE builds an atmosphere through resonance rather than definition. Joseph Beuys’s invocation of “field character” becomes a key point of correspondence—less as influence than as atmospheric twin. Artists, poets, and theorists appear not to decorate the text, but to form a living diagram of method-in-formation.

This Station is both conceptual primer and standalone artefact. It may be cited, entered, staged, or simply read. It does not outline the manoeuvre in full—that will come later—but it gestures toward its conditions, its charge, and its poetics. Through this opening, the reader enters a new form: cross-field, non-theatrical, and attuned to the murmuring thresholds of language and land.