1 Mapping Ottersberg: Using Performance Intervention to Mediate Performance as Research Melanie Dreyer-Lude Cornell University Video Link: http://vimeo.com/68047489. ‘Do you know where we can find cows?’ I asked a gentleman parking his bike in front of the REWE grocery store in Ottersberg, Germany. This was one on a list of questions my colleagues and I asked the unsuspecting citizens of this tiny village during our first collaborative performance intervention entitled ‘Mapping Ottersberg’. In this project I and two other artists embarked on a journey to uncover how local villagers mentally map the social and logistical geography around them. We were looking for ways in which individuals conceive of place and space and how those conceptions might change if we were to employ linguistic filters. What would happen if we were to pose as lost tourists and ask for directions in fluent German? Would we get the same response if we asked in English? Or bad German? How does language change the ways in which we view our environment and the people we encounter? How do the ways in which we see ourselves shift when speaking with someone more or less like us? These sorts of questions belong to a methodological framework that uses artistic practice as a research laboratory to investigate ideas. Performance as Research (PaR), a practice well- known in the academic circles of Great Britain and one which is emerging in the U.S. and Canada, uses performance as the locus for acquiring knowledge. The innovative and critical potential of practice-based research lies in its capacity to generate personally situated knowledge and new ways of modeling and externalizing such knowledge while at the same time revealing philosophical, social and cultural contexts for the critical intervention and application of knowledge outcomes (Barrett 2007: 2). Rather than establishing a dichotomy between theoretical objective research and personal creative practice, PaR provides an approach that works within a concentricity of both points of view. Inclusive rather than exclusive in its approach, Cecilia Lagerström argues that, although