MEDIATED INTOXICATION

DX Raiden & Scott Weir

INTRODUCTION

Greylands is a term used within urban planning circles to define tracts

of land that have been utilized and disposed of by industry and are

consequently undergoing `redevelopment` or `rehabilitation`. It is also

the title of a project taking place in Lebreton Flats Ottawa, Canada in

the fall of 1999 by a group called Borderline Developments.This group is

made up of two collaborations: Artengine (Ottawa) a

curating/commissioning body which seeks to develop art projects

encompassing Web and Robotic components and KIT (UK, Canada and

Australia), a multi-disciplinary collaboration whose work often

comprises media-based installation with a socio-political bent,

questioning the production of space within digital and concrete

landscapes. Artengine initially approached KIT to develop a `small`

project which one year down the line has turned into a labour intensive

joint venture funded by The Canadian Heritage Information Network,

Ontario Arts Council and sponsored by Companies such as Corel Computers

and Marconi. The `small` project initially proposed by KIT was aimed at

developing a piece first produced in Leigh, UK called KIT Homes. Here

the KIT collaboration set themselves up as a faux real estate agent in a

recently vacated school which was about to be demolished and redeveloped

as a middle class `two up two down` housing estate. Given that the

surrounding community was a recognizably low income, working class area

meant the erasure of the local school, was a heavily contested and

contentious issue.Thus KIT utilized the period between closure and

demolition to mark out `dream homes` onto the school’s playing fields

using hand-powered line markers usually used for marking out football

pitches on fields. These `dream homes` were drawings, plans and

blueprints produced by the residents and school children of the

community - buildings which if they were given the choice would be

constructed on the landmass in question.

The Greylands project is an attempt to develop ideas about contesting

space in another socio - political context - that of the polluted or

toxic landscape within the urban environment, land that is unsafe to

build on according to health and safety regulations and remains vacant

until the City Council or prospective industry pay for it to be

`rehabilitated`. Thus Lebreton Flats has laid dormant for over 20

years.The blueprints for Greylands will be drawn onto a web site set up

by Borderline Developments, the faux housing developers. Website users

will be invited to design and draw blueprints for buildings that would

not only inhabit a polluted atmosphere but also utilize the grounded

toxins. The submitted plans will subsequently be drawn out by a robot

which is hooked up to the website - http://www.greylands.com/ (via

Global Positioning System) onto the condemned site in Ottawa.

The robot lays 4 inch chalk lines akin to pitch markings, thereby using

pollution, the ultimate byproduct of capitalism, as an economy in its

own right, building a web based and 'concrete' community where toxicity

is a sign of social standing and stature. Greylands is a black humoured,

satirical comment on the use of urban space, the production of social

space in virtual and concrete worlds and a questioning of the politics

of city planning. The project is set to travel in 2000 to Mexico City to

a playground which,years after construction, was found to reside on the

site of a toxic waste dump. The project will also travel to the UK and

Australia at later dates.

What follows is the result of a series of e-mail conversations between

DX Raiden of the KIT collaboration and Scott Weir from Artengine while

the project was being developed. We decided to use these messages not

only to discuss the theoretical and socio-political trajectories of

Greylands but also as informative publicity for a project which, as we

go to press, is in danger of being shut down by the NCC (National

Capital Commission) in Ottawa. The NCC is a Crown Corporation and

planning body whose mandate is to plan and assist in the developmnent,

conservation, and improvement of the National Capital Region (ie: the

manipulation of the city to fit their continually updated "Plan for

Canada's Capital"). Borderline Developments have been dealing with the

NCC as a landowner - in a grand planning move they bought and levelled

the Lebreton Flats in the 1960's."

Mobot Manoeuvres

DX: Lebreton Flats can be viewed as an alien landscape. A no wo/mans

land that for the past 20 years has not benefited from any kind of

indepth investment to clean or ‘rehabilitate’ it. Altough countless

suggestions have been made to turn it into a public park, garden or

festival site, none have come to pass and so it remains a temporally

lost space, uncharted on the map of urban functionality, a grey blot on

the landscape. On this landscape a robot roams, stalking out chalk and

lime homelands as it goes, marking a metaphorical analogy to the Mars

Buggy Sojourner.

Designed to resemble a sit down lawn-mower, (an adult toy endemic to all

too many American and Canadian home-owners irrelevant of whether their

lawn is four square kilometres or four square metres) the Greylands

‘Mobot’ (mobile robot) is sent to scout and plot the threatening lands

ahead. The potential inhabitants meanwhile sit back, body safe from

harm, viewing the ensuing actions from a distance through a video camera

mounted on the front of the would-be mower. The use of the Mobot touches

upon an urban analogy to the new American dream, wrapped in the shape of

the Mars Buggy in its sense of remote viewing - a sort of terraform

voyeurism... surveillance and supposed pinpoint accuracy used as a tool

of ‘cultural control’ under the guise of US foreign policy as well as

for interplanetary conquest, the technologies utilised for both pursuits

coming together under the umbrella of the GPS system devised and

maintained by the American military. Greylands looks to unearth old

ideologies buried in the relatively new technologies of Internet and

Interplanetary programmes.

Urbanalogy

DX: If the space which Lefebvre talked about in his book The Production

Of Space was defined by Capitalism's pulverisation into available

parcels of private property, how Borderline Developments asks, does or

can WWW culture challenge this ideology? In an age where information has

become a social lubricant and David Harvey’s notion of flexible

accumulation is stretched to mean more in more places in less time all

the time, where, when and how can the WWW be used to construct

alternative models of socially spatialized dynamics? This does not mean

a social system which merely reflects the systematic metaphors of

concrete property and capital (in Harvey's terms a process which drives

"the urbanisation of consciousness") but instead one that treats the WWW

as a place to dislocate the lessons of urban analogy. In other words

using digital communication systems and the spaces they create to

construct places of plausible dissent and games of resistance.

All Terrain-Vague

DX: "Terrain-vague", the French term used to describe the disregarded

edge between locations (Grathwol, 1992), is where Greylands invests its

conceptual currency. Lebreton Flats has become a liminal or ambiguous

space in a social sense within the downtown core of Ottawa. Its

continued vacancy spells disillusion, whilst politically it speaks of a

lack of definition.It seems no one has really known what to do with an

empty postindustrial toxic site in the city. As such it has become a

theoretical as well as a practical tool to dig at the narrative

foundations of the constructed invironment.The vacant space is the wound

in the narrative of the built urban myth; a myth based upon Le

Corbusier's architectural call to arms in proposing the city as "the

fight against nature which is in the ascendancy".

Urban Space and social dynamics can be questioned by this architectural

rupture in the city. As an analogous temporal/spatial vortex it sucks

the system of urban signs into its rendering of place and by association

signals a disruptive understanding of time (spatial and temporal axis'

have always intersected to locate events within geographical and

historical perspectives).

In the confines of the contemporary metropolis where time’s worth is

measured by transferal and download rates, time’s value and meaning are

dissembled by the vacant space.The social re-structuring of meaning

within Lebreton Flats awaits an investment from a private or public

body, whether economic, artistic or symbolic. For a short period of time

Greylands is an attempt to critically invest (igate) in a space without

obvious onfines. The technologies used by Borderline Developments for

the project mirror western culture’s obsession with download rates, but

to a very different end. A participant simultaneously draws out a design

onto the web page and the Ottawa site (Lebreton Flats), allowing him/her

to construct a political, emotional and ecological map of reference

points in the shape of a dwelling. A blueprint for living. Handing over

a certain political and aesthetic autonomy to the public in the system

of urban planning threatens the civic authorities…even if it is only an

art project.

Suddenly those transparent confines become more visible as the NCC watch

every move made by Borderline Developments; Monthly meetings need to be

held to assure the NCC that Borderline Developments will not publicize

the toxicity levels of the site. The NCC also scrutinizes all press

releases and logos to do with the project and finally requested that the

projects title be changed from the original New Toxic Homes. There are

no real‘vacant’ spaces in the city.

Dwelling

DX: Borderline Developments invites a conspiring audience to collaborate

on a project with the intent of transforming digital and concrete

co-ordinates into the paradigm of place - the home. The process of

designing a personal dwelling in the public realm of the Internet is in

itself a disorienting one. Notions surrounding how one would use space

for the purpose of dwelling could and should be intimate. Having these

details mapped onto a public arena and photographed from above via an

aerial photograph reveals the self in a domestic expose. Heidegger in

his book Question of Being: An Ontological Consideration of Place states

that place is the unique dwelling of being. Subsequently, constructing

the self as place is the initial process through which one works to

locate themselves.The home or habitat as secondary construction

necessitates a set of interactions with a wider community whereby

identities are traded, shared and rebuked. Locating the ‘right’

neighbours, community and the undesired are amongst the prerequisites

when deciding on a place to live. Borderline Developments questions the

vectors of identity politics in a community context. It does so by

opening the realm of community to those who may not have had any shared

value systems other than owning a computer and modem.

This in itself has been ascribed as being enough by much over zealous

press, the kind that informs a pre-millennial public that cyberspace is

one big, repetitively stressed, but happy info-family. The factions

within digital culture are as prescribed and ritualized as those that

make up off-line culture, from the Hacker lingo and coded meeting points

on the Web to the closet homosexual sharing his desires in a Dreamweaver

wardrobe. Greylands rebukes any notion of the ‘sharing caring co-op.’

The landscapes offered are not founded in the utopian trajectories of

the 'innocent boundless space' often attributed to the world of the

homepage. Rather, they are the underbelly of Eden.

PREVIOUSLY ENJOYED SOIL

SW: Greylands rejects an enforced denial of the toxic environment

created through unconscious human abuse; it chooses to accept the fact

that the globe has become a fully polluted space with heightened foci

for this pollution, and attempts to address potential directions for

establishing a coexistence. The flats provide a site within which to

escape Martha Stewart's myth of a global preindustrial cranberry

wreathed Connecticut. Borderline Developments proposes an unabashedly

post industrial development, created with a polluted consumer in mind,

situated on 'previously enjoyed' soil and accessed via a media whose

ancestral technology spawned those marks. Perhaps this is appropriatefor

a project appropriating'telepresence', marketed to a population with

escapist aspirations; participants never need involve their own

physicality with the pollutants of the site. Gazing into their computer

screens, users may consider and enjoy use of a site which they will

never touch. These leftover spaces, abandoned by the concrete realm

because of inherent pollutants, uninhabitable climate or corporate

speculative indecision, may be safely accessed by vision through the

medium of the screen. The entire process of territorial colonization may

occur in the space between the monitor and the eye; discovery,

exploration, purchase, design, construction and (visual) inhabitation of

the 'built' product, involving only minimal physical exertion of the

finger tendons at the instigation of a downloaded

consciousness.Similarly appropriate is the submerging of this

consciousness to erect a spatial marker upon the flats from within the

carnival that is the web. With its technological innovation driven by

the needs of paid access pornographic sites and their demand for faster

downloads, the very foundation of inhabited electronic space is touched

by a morality based in roguish entertainments and commercial pleasures.

Borderline Developments situates this particular phase of

territorialization upon a concrete site marred through generations of

fallout (serving the demands of consumers), accessed via the impurities

of the one sphere whose structures transfer cleanly to reconstruct

themselves amongst the toxins of the other. Bahktin's spaces of

transgression emerge in the gaps between strong cultural programs of

cities; here his carnival is extended beyond its electronic borders to

scribe a toxic land mass, its emergence direct and immediate.

NEIGHBOURHOOD

SW: The neighbourhood that Borderline Developments proposes unites the

ultimate in secure place/myths (the home) with a feared twentieth

century product (toxic pollution), effectively re-orienting both into a

newly reworked (and perhaps more accurate) American dream. Ultimately

the result of this production is a thin line of white powder laid by a

remotely powered machine on an empty field. Like the ghostmarks of

archaeological remains thinly veiled by upper layers of soil, the lines

have no spatial volume or tangible substance, being merely referential

to a possible but currently non-existent reality. In this case the site

rewards the researcher with a record of layered uses; from

industrialists' mansions to lowly iron foundries, the dirt of the

Lebreton Flats has served consumers to exhaustion and records in its

depths the emergence of western technology. Beneath the tidy lawns a

record of industrial colonization lies disguised and fallow, its tangled

origins unappreciated, all visible remnants carefully erased to please a

touristic gaze. Borderline Developments asks the surfer to consider the

indelicate inhabitation of these spaces; having chewed up and ejaculated

this dimension, consumers have turned to technological territory for

distraction. The flats project reverses this vector back into the space

of the concrete, re-entering the dimension of memory from that of speed.

Under a conspiratorial disguise of technological advancement, Greylands

questions in what direction we are moving so quickly and demands

consideration of the media through which these trajectories occur.