OUTCAST REGISTRATION

Overview

Outcast Registration is a bilingual digital archive that brings twenty-five years of arts-based research onto the web. Working with artist-researcher Ulrike Möntmann, I built a platform that presents the life stories of incarcerated, drug-addicted women across Europe using the Matrix Method: a controlled vocabulary of keywords that allows participants to articulate their biographies as precise sequences of events and decisions. The archive combines text, audio, theory, and geography into one coherent structure.

Context

The material is sensitive: traumatic histories, institutional movement, street life, violence, addiction, and care. The challenge was to build a digital environment that could hold this complexity without sensationalising it. The research carries its own conceptual language – Matrix Method, Parrhesia, topological analysis of isolated, public, and cultural spaces – and the site needed to reflect that logic without turning into an academic apparatus. At the same time, the work spans many countries, institutions, and phases of life, so the platform had to make the women’s movement through these environments legible without reducing their experiences to data points.

We designed an interactive globe with the birth locations of all participants.

Approach

I structured the archive around the research itself. Biographies appear as factual timelines built directly from each woman’s Matrix Method selections. The conceptual analysis of spaces feeds into the way content is grouped and navigated. We also introduced geography as an organizing principle. I developed an interactive globe showing every participant’s birthplace, and a movement map that links audio recordings and Matrix Method entries to the physical locations where events occurred. This produced a spatial reading of the research: users can follow how institutional paths, neighborhoods, borders, and repeated displacements shape the narrative of each life. All of this sits in a lightweight, bilingual Craft CMS installation that allows researchers to continue adding biographies, recordings, documents, diagrams, and project updates.

Impact

The result is a growing archive of art-based research. It centralizes decades of material, supports new phases of Möntmann’s projects, and makes the archive accessible to audiences with different levels of familiarity: artists, researchers, students, and policymakers. The mapping features give a clearer sense of the geographic and institutional spread of the stories, while the structured biographies preserve the dignity and specificity of each voice. The system continues to expand as new participants, events, and research outputs are added, and it now serves as the definitive reference point for the project’s ongoing public and academic work.