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Paper short abstract

Researcher-as-Obstacle (RAO) is a method for accessing artists’ lived creative dynamics in real time. By intervening during making, RAO reveals how artworks affect their makers and how subjective processes become ethnographically observable.

Paper long abstract

Researcher-as-Obstacle (RAO) is a methodological framework designed to make artists’ subjective creative processes ethnographically accessible while they unfold. Rather than interviewing after the fact, RAO introduces controlled obstacles during the act of making and uses micro-phenomenological questioning to capture the artist’s moment-to-moment experience. This intervention foregrounds the oscillation between action (what the artist does to the work) and affect (how the evolving work redirects the artist’s attention, intention, or stance).

The approach reframes artworks not as completed objects but as active sites for accessing lived processes. Artists frequently describe the work-in-progress as “telling,” “guiding,” or “resisting” them. RAO documents how such expressions correspond to fine-grained experiential shifts that shape creative decisions in situ. These data reveal a dynamic field structured by tensions—between repetition and exploration, control and loss of control, recognition and surprise—within which artists evaluate what feels “alive,” “right,” or “worth continuing.”

Drawing on a first proof-of-concept case study, the presentation shows how RAO renders this field visible and analytically tractable. The method provides an empirical basis for studying subjective dynamics typically inaccessible to observation alone, and it opens a comparative avenue across artistic domains. For anthropology, RAO offers a way to treat artworks-in-the-making as relational phenomena: places where forms emerge, affect, and negotiate agency. For creativity studies, it specifies how felt qualities—rightness, aliveness, vitality—function as process-guiding criteria.

RAO thus positions artistic creation as a privileged entry point for an ethnography of subjectivity in motion.