Field Season One: May, 2025
Field Report Notice
The Bureau of Operational Landscapes circulates field reports as temporary dispatches. Each season is published for a limited duration and then withdrawn. This archive consolidates those materials as part of an ongoing record of infrastructural sites and public encounters.
Field Season 1 took place in Trenčín, Slovakia from May 17—31, 2025. The visit functioned as an initial survey of the disused industrial rail bridge and its surrounding terrain. The reports document first observations, site walks, and preliminary photographic work undertaken during that period.
May 19, 2025
Since I already used up valuable real estate explaining this newsletter, I wanted to make a short post about my night yesterday evening.
The house I am staying in is right beside the train line: I am not sure if this is some kind of genius idea on behalf of the organizers, or accidental happenstance. I have yet to thank or notify my hosts for this act of… inspiration or subterfuge.
I lean towards the former.
Last night, I entered into some strange fugue state, oppressed by the perpetually passing locomotives and their cargo, yet at the same time I figured this is perfect, I have become completely embodied into this project. Not quite train, not quite human, an amalgam of each. I thought of J.G. Ballard and his novel Crash (without the sexual obsession) or, better yet, maybe even Concrete Island: I am the architect, stranded in my (metaphorical) Jaguar amidst the entropy of modern infrastructure, a lost casualty of engineered wilderness. I am becoming infrastructural form, just like Ballard’s protagonist increasingly becomes the landscape itself.
Lying in bed, another train wizzes past, sparks flying from its brakes. I learn to anticipate its arrival, a faint whisper of steel-on-steel that spirals its sound from the distant horizon to crashing through the windows of my room. I leap out of bed; determined to make a video of these trains that have started to (already, I’ve only been here a mere matter of hours) shape my perception.
But enough of Ballard.
I try to sleep, only to awaken, again, to the hard logic of the railway that governs my thoughts, dreams, and actions. Another leap out of bed, another missed video.