Overt Research was developed as a method for exploring contemporary sites that have operated within and across the techno-scientific and military-industrial complex.

The approach has three phases. The first stage uses openly available digital information and published materials about sites of interest. This material is supplemented by expertise offered from a wide range of collaborators who may have knowledge of a site or its history. On occasion, unpublished materials are made available for our research, but we only accept information that we can make available to the public that is not illegal. We include information that might be accessible to the public, but not in circulation – including from academic research or activists and urban explorers.

Secondly, we classify sites by counter mapping the corporate and military complex – and to do this, we work in the field documenting these sites in person. Our approach has been supported by legal advice, and adheres to laws in relation to documenting sites of interest. Our field investigations reveal how scientific and related sites appeared or were presented to the public, in plain sight, whilst uncovering gaps between the experimental and the digital realm, our knowledge of a place and the infrastructures of power that go unnoticed in everyday life.

Finally, we published this material, either as documentation, in exhibitions displays or through a process of archiving and making available entire activists archives of site of specific interest. 

Office of Experiments co-curated the exhibition Dark Places, using this approach, which we honed during the process. Office of Experiments then developed a public engagement approach, that was also conceptual – a form of spatio-temporal excurion. These Critical Excusrions, otherwise referred to as our bus tours started at this point. Our last tour was in 2012, with Experimental Ruins, which was covered in Art Monthly in the article ‘A Letter from the M25’.

The Overt Research Project was led by Neal White with Steve Rowell and Lisa Haskel, supported by Prof Gail Davies, Nicola Triscott and John Hansard Gallery .  The first phase was carried in association with Bournemouth University; A Field Guide to the South West, Project Database covered the first stage of the project (to 2012).