laura geiger
Practices for unfinished interaction
Most interaction moves quickly toward recognition.
Someone reassures, explains, or smooths the moment over. A person becomes understandable very quickly.
Often this happens so quickly that people begin carrying roles, tensions, or forms of relational labor without fully noticing how they arrived there.
I create live practice environments where these movements can slow down enough to become perceptible while they are happening.
We aren’t trying to eliminate coherence or avoid care, and we don’t want to remain uncertain forever.
We are exploring what becomes possible when interaction is allowed to stay slightly unfinished a little longer.
The work moves between:
structured interactional experiments
improvisation
figures and objects
coordination
awkwardness
attention
humor
uncertainty
social rhythm
forms of contact that do not immediately settle into recognition
At times the work may feel quietly disorienting, awkward, funny, emotionally precise, unexpectedly intimate, or difficult to fully organize while it is happening.
why this matters
Power does not live only in systems and institutions.
It also lives in ordinary moments of interaction:
who reassures
who adapts
who absorbs tension
who becomes easy to recognize
whose discomfort quietly disappears so interaction can continue
These movements often feel natural, caring, and necessary.
Many are deeply tied to social belonging and relational safety.
They also shape:
what gets normalized
what remains unfamiliar
who carries relational labor
whose participation organizes the interaction
what kinds of relationship remain possible
Most of this happens too quickly to notice.
This work slows interaction down long enough for those movements to become perceptible before they disappear into normality.
Not to judge them but to become more aware of how participation shapes relationship, authority, perception, and possibility in real time.
These practices are not designed to produce correct behavior or ideal communication.
They are designed to make subtle interactional dynamics perceptible while people are still participating inside them.
ways to enter the work
witnessing without colonizing
A live practice in noticing how people become recognizable to one another
Small-group interactional experiments exploring reassurance, interpretation, coordination pressure, participation, and the speed at which interaction organizes itself into familiarity and coherence.
private sessions
For artists, facilitators, practitioners, and people inside difficult relational questions
Private online sessions for exploring:
creative process
uncertainty and transition
asymmetrical relationships
social roles and invisible labor
artistic development
unfinished interaction
forms of contact that are difficult to fully organize or resolve
Deep Puppetry™Studio Practice
Relational puppetry & unfinished encounter
A small-group online studio exploring figures, materials, movement, projection, awkwardness, animation, and contact before meaning fully settles.
Through improvisation, interactional scores, and shared experimentation, participants work with objects and interaction as unstable relational presences rather than fixed characters, symbols, or narratives.
The work explores how coordination, projection, attention, and recognition organize themselves through bodies, objects, and relational space.
organizational labs
Participation, coordination, and social organization in real time
Experiential labs for teams, organizations, and collaborative environments exploring how interaction shapes:
authority
participation
coordination
decision-making
reassurance
social pressure
the distribution of relational labor
The work focuses on making subtle participation dynamics perceptible while they are happening.
school of the small and imperfect
A long-term practice environment for unfinished interaction
An ongoing relational practice space where interaction is allowed to remain partially unresolved long enough for participation patterns to become visible.
Through repeated live interaction, awkwardness, interruption, improvisation, interactional scores, and collective experimentation, participants begin noticing how coordination, reassurance, responsibility, and social roles organize themselves in real time.
Rather than working toward mastery or self-improvement, the school develops perceptual range inside live interaction over time.
What participants notice over time
“This work has started to expand in me and in my relational field. I’ve noticed patterns repeating across different people and situations — with such similarity that I can’t help but see my own participation in creating the outcomes. There’s a kind of zoomed-out perspective now, like I’m in the interaction and also watching it unfold.”
-Kevin Karpinski
“We entered a space where things didn’t need to be fully formed, where we could delay our automatic responses and stay with what was happening. At times I didn’t understand what was happening. But I began to feel that not knowing didn’t mean I was lost.”
-Anita van Ast“Through this work, I’ve become more willing to stay with difficulty rather than resolve it. I’ve learned to work with stillness, absence, and silence, and to let material and relationship lead rather than trying to control the process. It has changed how I participate in collaborative and group environments.”
-Julia Tribe
About Laura
Laura Geiger creates participatory and artistic practice environments exploring how interaction organizes attention, meaning, participation, and relationship in real time.
Her work focuses especially on moments where people rush toward reassurance, recognition, explanation, or coherence and what becomes perceptible when those movements slow down.
Through projects including Deep Puppetry™, Witnessing Without Colonizing, and School of the Small and Imperfect, she develops relational practices that use improvisation, objects, interactional scores, awkwardness, participation, and unfinished encounter to study how recognizability, coordination, and relational labor emerge inside live interaction.
Her background draws from puppetry, applied theatre, participatory art, improvisation, somatic inquiry, and relational practice.
