These research notes document forty years of embedded observation inside British institutions at moments of transformation — NAAFI contracting at the end of the Cold War, the cooperative internet becoming corporate infrastructure, a Victorian telecommunications empire dismantling itself through financial engineering, a housing association absorbing the logic it was built to resist. Each note is reconstructed from personal testimony: what it felt like to be inside the machine while the machine was changing. Taken together they constitute the biographical archaeology underlying the Liminal Mind practice — the sequence of institutional encounters that produced the artist now making work about memory, extraction, and what remains when organisations created with genuine social purpose have moved on.
