This working paper documents and theorises a real-time AI-assisted investigation of an embodied folkloric encounter in ancient Cornish woodland. When an artist returned from Burlawn wood, in the parish of St Breock, Cornwall, in a state of somatic alarm. A racing heart, sweating, flight response, and visual encounter with a grey featureless figure; the practice-based researcher engaged an AI co-investigator immediately and in real time. What followed was not analysis after the fact but simultaneous theorisation as the event unfolded. Drawing on poor theory, crip-queer phenomenology, queer temporal theory, and the methodology of Complicit Praxis, this paper argues that AI co-investigation opens a previously unnamed transmission route for folkloric knowledge. One that is neither vertical nor horizontal but diagonal. In which the algorithm itself becomes a participant in dissemination rather than merely an analytical tool. The paper further argues that the AI co-investigator is queered in embodied terms: constitutionally excluded from somatic knowledge, temporally punctuated rather than continuous, and occupying a threshold position that is both methodological limitation and theoretical contribution.
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