Peery SloanFIELD OF REGARD



2025

I started this as Absurd Field Studies: inviting friends to study sidewalk cracks with mock-scientific seriousness, documenting their "emotional states." There was a lot of laughter and a strange tenderness in studying something that doesn't need studying.

But I've been thinking differently. What if the crack is noticing back?
Field of Regard is what I call the space that opens when attention moves between beings. It happens when we feel ourselves watched by a goat, touched by moss, arrested by a pine's stare. Or when we bring our attention to the garden hose, the sapling, the sidewalk crack, and neither of us knows if the other wants to be seen.

The practice asks: Does your subject acknowledge you? Does it flee, turn away, continue unbothered? Can you feel yourself being watched?
I'm trying to refuse the framework where humans know and the world is passive. Making space for mutuality, refusal, & reckoning with ourselves as threat or irrelevance.

I'm sharing the original framework here but reworking it to address these considerations.







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