Drawn from my PPS research project (2020-21), this article is a gentle provocation to neurotypical public space artistic researchers to acknowledge the presence of different neurotypes in participation work, specifically autistic people. I suggest the term "social performance" to describe styles of interpersonal communication in public space, highlighting some of the differences between autistic and neurotypicals. The text concludes with some first suggestions to design more inclusive participatory methods.

Bader, O., & Fuchs, T. (2022). Gestalt Perception and the Experience of the Social Space in Autism: A Case Study. Psychopathology, 55(3–4), 211–218. https://doi.org/10.1159/000524562

Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, H., Botha, M., Hens, K., O’Donoghue, S., Pearson, A., & Stenning, A. (2023). Cutting our own keys: New possibilities of neurodivergent storying in research. Autism, 27(5), 1235–1244. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613221132107

Belek, B. (2023). ‘A Smaller Mask’: Freedom and Authenticity in Autistic Space. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 47(3), 626–646. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-022-09794-1

Davidson, J. (2010). ‘It cuts both ways’: A relational approach to access and accommodation for autism. Social Science & Medicine, 70(2), 305–312. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2009.10.017

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Meyerding, J. (1998) Diagonally Parked In A Parallel Universe. Social Anarchism #26. http://library.nothingness.org/articles/1/en/display/251 accessed 24 January 2024.

Miller, D., Rees, J., & Pearson, A. (2021). “Masking Is Life”: Experiences of Masking in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults. Https://Home.Liebertpub.Com/Aut, 3(4), 330–338. https://doi.org/10.1089/AUT.2020.0083

Neilson, S. (2023). The Power of an Autistic Lens: Visualising Activity in Shared Public Space. 339–350. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36302-3_25

Pearson, A., & Rose, K. (2021). A Conceptual Analysis of Autistic Masking: Understanding the Narrative of Stigma and the Illusion of Choice. https://Home.Liebertpub.Com/Aut, 3(1), 52–60. https://doi.org/10.1089/AUT.2020.0043

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WHO autism

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/autism-spectrum-disorders  accessed 25 January 2024

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Autism spectrum disorder (henceforth autism) is a neurodiverse condition characterised by different processing patterns in the brain relating to social interaction and sensory perception. The World Health Organisation (WHO) classes the condition as a disorder and estimates that statistically, 1% of children are autistic. This implies that around 1% of adults are autistic, since there are no medications or surgeries that can alter an autistic person's experience of the world. Any sample of public space and the people in it is likely to include one or more autistics, with varying combinations of spectrum traits. While physical accessibility is rightly a consistent presence in public space discourse, accessibility concerns for autistics are not common knowledge. These concerns can be broadly described as either physical, relating to heightened sensory perception, or social, relating to interpersonal behaviour. While the former is no less important, studies already exist to explore and express this need. This article therefore focuses on social concerns for autistics in public space, in the context of artistic research.

Artistic research has the creative flexibility to overcome this exclusion with ease, but part of the problem is lack of definition. This article proposes the term social performance to describe the different codes of social behaviour in public space, specifically NT and autistic, and shares autoethnographic insight into the experience of public space artistic research as an autistic, thereby hoping to increase awareness of the multiplicity of social behaviour in public space, and in artistic research itself.

The majority of studies considering autism and public space are concerned with sensory adaptations for urban design (e.g. Davidson & Henderson 2016, Neilson 2023, Rapp, Cena, Castaldo et al 2018, Davidson 2010…). While these studies and recommendations are necessary and useful, far less is written on the experience of public space as a social situation, and even less is written about autistic experience by autistics themselves. This is partly due to accusations of bias, particularly in the clinical context, and partly due to generalised NT prejudice towards neurodiverse viewpoints in academic discourse.

Lack of wholeness in perception of social scenes is a further layer to social performance, establishing the context in which masking takes place, if it can take place at all. NT reactions to unmasked autistic social performance can be at best awkward, at worst life-threatening. However, artistic intervention in public space has the possibility to create interactions where natural autistic social performance is acceptable. This was something I discovered by accident in my own artistic research.

My research focuses on streets in cities as public space: streets are spaces of passage and encounter, potentially a powerful means of disrupting capitalist work/consumption trajectories. I adapt the Situationist technique of dérive to explore streets through the movement of water, and propose creative interventions to challenge the use and perception of street space. However, my initial project for my MA raised meaningful conflicts of expectation in my autistic experience of public space, which at the time I was unequipped to articulate.

Artistic research has more than enough flexibility to connect with those who communicate differently. This is also true in my own work – in the procession version, for example, I have the potential to make the walk more accessible for autistics by creating a visual code for verbal participation, after the example of Autscape [as described in Belek 2023]. In the first version I distributed small "pilgrim badges" which included samples of all the coloured ribbons on my costume, but this could easily be adapted as a social performance code, for instance purple for "I prefer to walk and talk", green for "I prefer to walk in silence". In the solo walk, I could lean more actively into my autistic social performance as part of the character (a strange creature alone and confused in a strange environment…), though this would be inadvisable without an NT co-conspirator to help me if a situation became unsafe. These are just two examples: there are many ways to accept multiple social performances, for myself as an autistic artistic researcher, and for NT researchers working with participatory methods in public space.

"I want to go back into the water."

[personal notebook]

Autistic social performance does not match NT expectations of good participation: we wriggle and fidget when we are listening closely; we express emotion through physical actions and making sounds rather than subtle facial expressions; we are unnerved and confused by small-talk; we make miniscule amounts of eye-contact, our speech is often uninflected, unfluent, and full of pauses and hesitations. Yet we exist and participate in the world, in public space, in our local communities, and exclusion from group situations is often not a choice. Artistic research is well-positioned to be able to include us as equals rather than test subjects, and accessibility improvements for autistics are also improvements for other communities with overlapping needs. Accepting differences in communication styles as alternative social performances is a small step towards a more inclusive world.

"[...] how do you include people who may need the benefits of inclusion, but cannot bear the physical and emotional presence of it?" [(Singer, 1999, p. 67), in Davidson 2010]

Introducing the term social performance as a component of public space research increases awareness of the neuro-mixed nature of public space, and articulates social accessibility concerns for autistics. This in turn can help artistic researchers make meaningful adjustments to include autistic people, who statistically comprise 1 in every 100 people, when designing interventions which involve participation in public space. It is hoped that fellow artistic researchers will become more aware of NT social performance as one option amongst others, and that the flexible nature of artistic research means it is well-placed to accommodate different social performances in public space. Such accommodations might include:

"The [neurotypical] world says I'm a failure if I'm alone. But if I'm not alone, I'm not entirely myself."

[Meyerding 1998]

Note: it is not advisable to openly ask people if they are autistic, in the same way it is not advisable to ask people if they are queer or trans.

"Neurodiversity studies are seldom taken seriously neither in the humanities (‘what it means to be human’) nor in medicine (dominated by deficit constructions of neurodivergence), due to presumptions that neurodivergence is somehow outside of what it means to be human (in a social or psychological sense) (Stenning 2020), and because it does not fit neatly (if at all) into the predominant deficit construction." [Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et. al. 2022]

For autistics with associated cognitive disabilities, masking is not possible, and in these cases the reactions to unfiltered autistic social performance from NTs can be extreme. Bader and Fuchs' 2022 article analysing the murder of Eyad al-Hallaq, an autistic Palestinian adult attempting to cross an Israeli checkpoint in Al-Aqsa/Jerusalem, suggests that lack of embodied understanding combines with poor gestalt perception of social scenes to create feelings of uncertainty and unsafeness in unfamiliar situations for autistic adults, which leads to unexpected social reactions that are frequently misinterpreted by NT adults, in this case, running away in fear. Eyad was chased down by the checkpoint soldiers and shot six or seven times, as as teacher from his school shouted that he was disabled. (It must be noted that a military checkpoint on occupied land is a horrific example of "public" space, and there was significant power imbalance in the interaction: in order to accept autistic social performance as genuine, one must first consider the autistic person to be a fellow human being.)

One of my research projects within the MA work was an interactive performance walk. In the character of a spirit of the river Zenne in Brussels, which was re-routed underground in the 19thC, I would walk an odyssey along the old route of the river, asking passers-by if they knew where the river was, because I wanted to go home. While this sounded perfectly feasible on paper, for various reasons I did not respect my neurological approach to the world and the people in it: approaching a stranger to start an open-ended conversation in public space is one of the hardest and most stressful things I could have forced myself to do.

• Establishing a social performance code in group situations (e.g. using coloured badges to indicate conversation preferences)
• Offering the possibility to write a response to a question instead of speaking immediately
• Offering the possibility to discuss via email, messaging, or an online group
• Accepting common autistic socal performance as an alternative social performance, not "failed" NT performance. Examples include: reduced or no eye-contact; hesitant, formulaic, and uninflected speech; reduced facial expressions; apparently paradoxical body language; increased physical distance from interlocutors; physical stimming to express emotion.

Neurological differences in the way an autistic brain processes information mean that indications of neurotypical (NT) social behaviour and speech are often unintuitive and/or invisible to us. If the autistic individual does not suffer from an associated cognitive disability and appears physically "normal", we feel intense pressure to conform to NT standards of behaviour, movement and speech. Social interaction in public space, therefore, is a constant performance for autistics on a level that NT people are unequipped to intuitively understand. This is a point of concern for artistic research, particularly in the context of participatory strategies and efforts to increase the sociability of public space and community building. While there is nothing wrong with such strategies per se, common participatory methods of spontaneous interaction, verbal communication and group activities exclude the participation of autistics and other groups, for example speakers of other languages, the deaf, and those with disabilities affecting verbal communication.

"I don't want to talk to people. [...] Does performance have to include talking?" [personal notebook]

The following year I offered the same walk along the river route as a processional group walk, and with control over the situation and time to script my words in advance, I felt confident enough to speak. But what was surprising to me was that the group of participants talked amongst themselves, for the entire walk. I had been entirely unaware of the social dimension of what I was offering, and I felt initially annoyed that they were talking about things that were completely unrelated to water and cities and streets and the river, but it dawned on me after a kilometre that this was small talk, and that this is how NTs make themselves feel comfortable and safe around other people.

It is in this context that I propose the term social performance to describe codes of social interaction in public space. Referring to interpersonal interactions as social performance allows for the existence of multiple interpersonal realities: the instinctive communication styles of autistics, and the intricate web of behavioural codes and gestalt perception of social scenes which is apparently instinctively obvious for NT people but which autistics struggle to perceive and comprehend, much less perform appropriately.

The apparently simple act of "having a conversation" with an NT is in fact a serious investment of energy, and this before the content of the conversation can begin to be considered. These exhaustive efforts to perform NT social behaviour are known as masking [Pearson & Rose 2021, Miller, Rees & Pearson 2021]. To some extent all individuals mask parts of their personality in public social situations, but for autistics the effort involved is far greater, as described above: we are overriding multiple facets of our instinctive behaviours to conform to another code of social performance. This takes significant intellectual effort.

For three of the five walks, I was indeed so stressed by the pressure to approach and initiate conversation with strangers that I became mute, even when other people approached me to initiate conversation. My notes for these walks testify to confusion, fear, and unease. This was not shyness: I had created NT expectations of social performance for myself that I was fundamentally unequipped to meet. For the other two walks I was accompanied by a friend who lived nearby, and with the possibility to change shoes afterwards these two walks included a short section where I climbed into the middle of a public water feature, a long rectangular pool with a fountain at one end, and I walked through the water. In hindsight, walking through the middle of a fountain dressed as a water nymph gave me a fleeting moment where I could unmask in public space. Walking in the middle of a full fountain dressed in ribbons, I felt calm, comfortable, and confident. I was doing something openly strange with no pressure to behave normally, and there was no conceivable way for me to be approached by a stranger unless they too splashed into the pool. The feeling of walking through water, the weight of it on my legs, the chill in my feet, distracted me from the aural and visual overstimulation of the city. I could watch my feet moving slowly through the water and not worry about being bumped into, shouted at or talked to. Feeling and hearing the wind in my clothing is one of my stims, and the ribbons of my coat were fluttering constantly against my legs and arms. It felt wonderful.

The WHO guidelines for diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder include the inability of autistics to read and respond to non-verbal social cues [ICD-11 6A02]. Studies have shown there are significant differences in the brain activity of autistic adults in social situations compared to NT adults [e.g. Hadjikhani et al 2007, Kevin & Carter 2008, Zilbovicius et al 2006], confirming neurological differences in the way non-verbal social interactions are perceived and processed in the brain. To offer my own brain as an example, I am unable to perceive facial expressions beyond the most extreme emotions, I do not intuitively understand tone of voice, and I do not understand the connections between body language and emotional meaning, including that which is communicated by my own facial expressions, movements and positioning. In NT social performance situations, a significant proportion of my attention is dedicated to manually attempting to decipher the body language of my interlocutors and trying to make sure my own body is not accidentally communicating something I do not feel. On top of this, an NT-acceptable level of eye-contact is impossible to sustain without triggering a deep sense of unease and fear (which subsequently erodes my ability to decipher non-verbal cues), and sensory sensitivities and processing differences affect how hard it is to focus on the movements and voice of one person (for example, it is not possible for me to tune out background noises). I must also remember to make appropriate facial expressions to show I am listening, and I must also remember to speak slowly, not to change topics abruptly and not to share too much information ("info-dumping"), and also remember that those around me do not know what thoughts or intentions are in my head unless I verbalise them.

"For those unable to perform similar feats of ‘mind-reading’, whose environment is perceived and processed according to very different rules, fitting in or getting by involves ‘unnatural’, exhaustive efforts: ‘I sometimes get so tired – you have such complicated rules in your world. And all the time I have to think and think and think about them’." [Gerland, 2003, p. 255, in Davidson 2010]