Listening Otherwise: Working with The Verbatim Formula
What does it mean to listen to someone who has spent their life not being heard? This question sat at the heart of a fieldwork collaboration with The Verbatim Formula (TVF), a London-based participatory arts initiative, and it pushed our research far beyond conventional data collection into something rawer and more accountable.
TVF works with a deceptively simple methodology. Care-experienced young people record testimonies in their own words. Theatre practitioners then perform those recordings word for word, delivered live through headphones directly to audiences. No paraphrasing. No mediation. The verbatim formula commits to fidelity as an ethics: the words belong to the person who spoke them, and that ownership is preserved through every stage of performance.
Our collaboration introduced augmented reality (AR) into this process. During trauma-informed workshops at Edinburgh Napier University, care-experienced co-researchers did something difficult: they discussed what they would say if given direct access to the people running the care system. One testimony kept returning: a hug can change a lot. The impossibility of hugging a social worker, bound by institutional protocol, became a focal point. Co-researchers used Image Theatre techniques to physicalise this, creating a freeze-frame tableau of two figures in an embrace. We then scanned this tableau volumetrically, producing a 3D digital artefact rendered as a point cloud, abstract enough to protect confidentiality while preserving the emotional weight of the original gesture.
The AR artefact worked through a barcode system. When scanned with an iPad, it projected the 3D hugging figures into physical space, anchored to a lightbox, with the verbatim audio playing through a Bluetooth speaker. The artefact did not represent the testimony, it performed alongside it, extending the live encounter into a material-discursive event.
The stakes of this approach became concrete at the Department for Education in London, during an event titled My Story, My Words. A co-researcher we call Nathan invited policymakers to engage with the prototype directly. Nadhim Zahawi, then Secretary of State for Education, circled the 3D model, shifting his physical stance to view the hugging figures from different angles, then paused to listen to the audio. He left requesting a copy of the prototype for his office.
What TVF calls the “digital trace” matters here. Live performance ends. The artefact persists. It can arrive at a minister’s desk weeks later, still carrying the verbatim words of someone who has navigated care placements, social workers, and institutional distance. The digital artefact does not merely document the encounter; it continues to act within new contexts, inviting audiences to reckon again with the question Nathan posed: I’m more than my barcode, I’m more than a statistic.
Working with TVF clarified something about the aesthetics of care: genuine listening is an embodied, material practice, not an abstracted empathic gesture. As Maggie Inchley of TVF put it, verbatim performance is “a very embodied mode of attentiveness.” The AR artefacts extended that attentiveness beyond the room, into offices, into policy corridors, carrying voices that quantitative data consistently leaves behind.