A Ritual-Digital-Artefact Series

This is not a retrospective.
This is not a closed work.

STATIONS OF THE MANOEUVRE is an unfolding field—a serial praxis in ritual digital form.
Each STATION functions as a ritual threshold: a charged site of writing, walking, history, and performative thinking.
Some echo histories. Some fracture space. Some whisper forward.

Across the series, texts gather. Landscapes are read. Movements are summoned. The work does not resolve. It re-enters.

This is not a book. It is not an archive. It is not a journal. It is not a blog.

This is a ritual digital artefact: iterative, devotional, open.

Begin anywhere. But expect to return.

Contextual Abstract

I began developing the manoeuvre in the early 1990s.

What started as an attempt to reconcile performance, historiography, and place soon became something more: a ritualised method of reading and writing space, of doing history, shaped by citation, embodied presence, and political memory.

Since then, I’ve performed over 50 manoeuvres across international sites—open countryside, urban interiors, heritage locations, museums, academic institutions, contested territories, and spiritual architectures. Each one a charged encounter. Each one a field charged with resonance.

The manoeuvre is not a dérive. Not land art. Not a re-enactment. It is something else: a scored act of situated citation or a silent inspection.

A discursive performance.

A recursive performance.

A way of being.

The texts gathered here come from over three decades of that practice—some drawn from my doctoral work (awarded in 2009 with no corrections), others composed in parallel with performance, durational actions, and lived field engagement.

STATIONS OF THE MANOEUVRE is the first time I’ve released this material in serial form. It is not a book. It is not a fixed archive. It is a rolling, open work—a constellation of Ritual-Digital Artefacts unfolding across time.

Each STATION stands alone, but resonates with the rest.

You can begin anywhere.
But expect to return.

Mercer Manoeuvre Harrogate, 2023 Tim Brennan

photo credit: Michael Pinchbeck

The following STATIONS form part of an open, serial unfolding.

Rooted in decades of manoeuvre practice, each is a standalone artefact—anchored in method, memory, and fieldwork.

🔹 STATION I: FIELD CHARGE

Cosmology, memory, and the pre-sentence ritual.

A charged beginning. This STATION gathers fragments, epigraphs, and early signals. Method is not explained but intuited. Before argument—attunement. Before movement—field.

This STATION doesn’t begin—it tunes. Epigraphs murmur. Coordinates shimmer. A charge in the field gathers form. 

→ [forthcoming link for more information and to purchase this artefact]

🔹 STATION II: PROTO-MANOEUVRES

Precedents, songlines, and the poetics of orientation.
Before the manoeuvre comes the gesture. This STATION excavates devotional movements and early performative roots.

→ [forthcoming]