Updated: 5 days ago
issue 2
fall 2026
The User Who Exists on Paper
The lead producer behind MANIFEST--a large-scale cultural project that engages with the European memory of the transatlantic slave trade--wonders whether audience access is restricted before the project is fully realized.
Manifest Final Exhibition - Nantes 2022
Editor's Introduction
In “The User Who Exists on Paper,” Matias Seidler describes the persistent challenge of prematurely defining project audiences for grant funders and the risks of being too broad or too narrow in how users are defined. Using the case study of MANIFEST, a project Danish XR studio Khora coordinated about European memory of the transatlantic slave trade (co-funded by the European Commission under the Creative Europe Programme), Seidler notes how complex user profiles are flattened to become recognizable to proposal evaluators and funders and suggests that efforts toward inclusion begin before the project is even underway.
The call had been open for thirty days. We had to decide quickly whether we were writing for it, and if we were, who the project would be for.
It was a European cultural-innovation instrument: the kind that funds XR in museums when museums can be persuaded by a consortium to speak on their behalf. It wanted underserved audiences. It wanted measurable engagement. It wanted pathways to sustainability. On a shared screen, someone had pasted the paragraph every consortium partner reads three times before anyone speaks: the paragraph about beneficiaries.
We were not arguing about a person. We were arguing about a category.
The original beneficiary description we wrote into our proposal had come from one of the team members with the deepest connection to the subject. It was careful, specific, hard-won. By the time the rest of us had finished making it legible to the call, something in it had shifted.
I can't show you that shift. We drafted the way everyone drafts, in a shared document, four people typing over each other. Nobody saved the version from before the hour began. What survives is a revision history that records keystrokes and not decisions, which is a different thing entirely. The rest is reconstruction, from memory and from the language that made it through.
One partner thought the group sounded too narrow. Another worried we could not demonstrate impact if the baseline was this specific. A third suggested we broaden the age range. A fourth wanted the language to sound more inclusive. Around the table (really around a video call, across two time zones), nobody said anything false. That was the disturbing part. We moved phrases. We replaced one word with a softer one. We widened an age range by eleven years. We widened a word. By the end of the hour, we had a target group that could be written about in the present tense, described in a paragraph, and made to survive first review.
At some point the user became easier to understand. At some point the user also became less real.
That person appears first in documents. They show up in call texts, needs assessments, work packages, dissemination plans, stakeholder maps, risk matrices. Distinct enough to justify funding, broad enough to make the results feel transferable. Pieces of real people adhere to them. But by the time they are ready for circulation inside an application, they have been cleaned, translated, and made available for institutional use. The first user of an XR project often exists on paper long before they exist in the work. In MANIFEST, the proposal did not disappear once the grant was awarded. Its technical description became part of the signed grant agreement as the Description of the Action, and later reports asked us to explain deviations from it.
I have been in enough rooms like that one to know that distortion rarely arrives looking like distortion. It arrives as practicality, as care, as feasibility, as clarity. A consortium is trying to make something possible. A public institution needs to see itself in the work. A call has its own favoured grammar, its own quiet ideas about which publics look serious and which look unwieldy. Nobody needed to be cynical for the narrowing to begin. Most of us were trying to do something useful: get the proposal above threshold, keep the project from dying on contact with the first administrative filter, protect an idea we liked.
The field prefers to tell the access story downstream. Who got the headset. Which school could afford the deployment. Which clinic had the staff capacity. Those are real questions. But they come after the more consequential one: which version of the intended community made it into the proposal, and what had to be left out of them to get it there.
This becomes especially consequential when XR promises more than utility. It promises presence, embodied understanding, preservation, empathy, healing. When the promise is empathy, the problem compounds. If the community has already been simplified to fit the form, that version can shape what the experience is designed to make present.
I know how this language works because I have helped write it. At Khora, my job sat upstream: reading calls, spotting openings, assembling partnerships, translating between institutions. Khora builds immersive technology; the implementation partner, the museum, the clinic, the school, is the one who actually puts it in front of people. I shaped the description of who those people were, and then I handed it over. The people the proposals describe, the patient in the chair, the student in the classroom, the community for whom the history is not abstract, I did not meet them. That is the delivery partner's work¹. What I leave behind is the language.
The ongoing impact of a proposal’s language can be seen most clearly in MANIFEST², a project Khora coordinated about European memory of the transatlantic slave trade. It used immersive technology to engage people for whom that history is not a historical abstraction but a present-tense inheritance. Getting the target group right mattered enormously, morally and politically, because this is a community that has been misrepresented, spoken over, and made into an object of other people's education often enough. We were careful. We went through the language many times. And across a single proposal document, the relevant constituency ends up described as: "young and multicultural artists and audiences"; "Europeans whose contemporary identity is personally connected with or bears the traces of the transatlantic trade of enslaved people"; and, in the indirect target group section, the “global diaspora.”³
These were three of six formulations for the audience. Not because we were confused. Because we were trying, simultaneously, to be accurate, to be sensitive, to satisfy the call's European framing requirements, and to describe a constituency that does not sit neatly inside any of those constraints. They are not all the same people. Different sections ask different questions, and the group is reshaped each time. None of them is wrong. Taken together, they show the honest pressure a proposal exerts on the people it is trying to name. I helped write those sentences. I think they were the best we could do. I also think something real kept slipping between them. All six formulations survived into MANIFEST’s signed Description of the Action.
Other proposals reach for other words. A description can be wide enough to survive review and too wide to build from, leaving the delivery team to narrow it, usually toward whoever is easiest to reach.
Consortium structure shapes this before language does. In the large multi-partner projects I worked on, Khora typically entered after the coordinators, the research universities, and the public authorities had established the frame.. By the time the community-facing partner arrives, the vocabulary for describing the public has often already been set. Who was invited first. Which institution made the proposal look serious. Which partner brought administrative credibility, clinical legitimacy, cultural authority, implementation realism. The people who write the first draft of the beneficiary section are usually not the people who have met the community. We refine it. We do not usually reopen it. Projects need descriptions. The problem starts when a pressured translation is treated as a transparent account of the people being served.
In-VR screen capture of Sonjé by David Gumbs. 2022
The access illusion is not only that immersive technology fails to reach everyone. It is that the public it imagines serving has often been narrowed, softened, broadened, strained, and administratively stabilized before the work begins. The illusion survives because the process is respectable: feasibility, evidence, inclusion, uptake, sustainability, impact.
The problem is structural. A field that acknowledged the gap between the communities it describes and the communities it serves would have to change how it writes proposals, which would mean changing how it writes calls, which would mean changing what gets funded. Any project that claims access should be able to say, plainly: what kind of user was easy to imagine, what kind was difficult to describe, which institutions had to be present for the work to seem plausible, and what complexity had to be flattened for the proposal to hold. Not as a confession. As documentation. Alongside the impact pathway, the risk matrix, the dissemination plan.
MANIFEST's entry, then. Easy to imagine: an audience young, multicultural, European, imagined for us by the call before we sat down. Hard to describe: inheritance, which runs through families and not syllabi, and for which no funding geography holds a column. Flattened: the difference between a debt and a demographic.
Would such a document survive the pressure it describes? Not if anyone scores it. Attach a criterion and consortia will learn to write the flattening they are willing to admit to, which is the flattening that reads well.
The record I would trust is not unread but unscored, written while the choice is still visible, before anyone knows which admission will look responsible. What changed MANIFEST was not a document at all. What changed MANIFEST was not a document at all. Artists came after the money and made things that exploded these original categories⁴. At the Lisbon debrief, they reopened questions about audience that the proposal had already settled on paper. They argued against charging for the final exhibition and asked whether Black communities and schoolchildren would actually be there. They also questioned where we were looking for an audience in the first place. By then the grant was signed and production was underway, so those questions were not easy to reopen. The exhibition in Nantes was free in the end. The six audience descriptions stayed where they were, in the signed grant agreement. The paragraph is archived permanently. The things are filed under dissemination.
Who had to become legible first, and what did we have to leave out of them?
Manifest Final Exhibition - Nantes 2022
Endnotes, because I'm just that kind of guy.
[1] For a discussion of how projects are divided into distinct teams and a new model for collaboration, see Scarlett Kim’s essay in this issue.
[2] MANIFEST: New artistic perspectives on memories of the transatlantic trade of enslaved people. Co-funded by the European Commission under the Creative Europe Programme. https://www.projectmanifest.eu/
[3] MANIFEST, Official Application Form (Part B), CREA-CULT-2021-COOP-2 (2021); Grant Agreement 101055921, Annex 1, Description of the Action. Unpublished; on file with the author.
[4] MANIFEST artworks and artists in residence. https://www.projectmanifest.eu/artworks/
Matias Seidler
Matias K. Seidler is Senior Consultant at University College Copenhagen (KP), working on AI and technology in education, funding and partnerships. Before joining KP, he spent seven years at Khora, a Copenhagen XR studio, most recently as Partner and Head of EU Research and Innovation. He built and funded European projects across culture, education and public institutions, and was concept and programme lead for MANIFEST. Trained in philosophy and science studies, his work sits between technology, institutions and the structures that turn ideas into projects.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matiasseid/
Affiliation: University College Copenhagen (KP)