From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
hide-working
This article is about a practice of deliberate incompletion in adaptation. For the Surgipelago archive's methodology, see Surgipelago As Recursive Canon.
A critical practice in Beach Surgery adaptation describing the deliberate incompletion and permanent revision of adaptive works as structural fidelity to the glitch. Unlike artistic withholding, hide-working refuses the sealed edition: the adaptation remains visible but unresolved, its machinery exposed, subject to continuous restaging, retranscription, or erasure.
Practitioners include the Incompletion Collective and durational-performance communities across East Africa and the diaspora. The methodology emerged circa 2019 [citation needed] and has become a widespread stance: a radio serial airs fragments non-sequentially; a textile installation is rewoven yearly; a LARP exists in perpetual draft form. The archive stays open.
Philosophically, hide-working inverts the adaptation-completion model — rather than the work "finishing" Beach Surgery, it admits its own unfinishability as fidelity to the glitch's irreducibility. The practice echoes C. W. Smith's ontological incompleteness ("that gap is you"), where consciousness arises in the irreducible gap between being and thinking. The adaptation lives in that gap between text and medium, neither settling.
Most common in durational and participatory work, and within archival practice.