Click to access essay

Mediated Intoxiation: Navigating with Double Vision

Abstract
The Greylands project was 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 were invited to design and draw blueprints for buildings that would not only inhabit a polluted atmosphere but also utilise the grounded toxins. The submitted plans will subsequently be drawn out by a robot which is hooked up to the website (via Global Positioning System) onto the condemned site in Ottawa. 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 coexistence. The flats provide a site within which to escape Martha Stewart's myth of a global pre-industrial 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.. 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.

Bio

DX Raiden is a writer who is a member of the KIT collaboration. He is a regular contributor to ETC Magazine (Canada), A N monthly (UK) and Sandbox (USA). He has an essay The Soft-Where specifics of Site soon to be published in LOG magazine (New Zealand). KIT are a collaboration who often work with contentious concrete or digital sites. They have recently completed projects at The Physics Room (New Zealand) and Project Space (Melbourne). KIT are currently developing new gallery projects for, Blasthaus gallery (San Fransisco), Side Street Projects (Los Angeles), Articule gallery (Montreal), CAST gallery (Tasmania). They are also developing off site and urban intervention projects for Platform (Melbourne) and Command N (Tokyo). KIT are also producing soundtrack work for architectures under the name 'Battery Operated'. They are performing surround sound diffusion events of their latest project -Chases Through Non-Place at the following venues in 2000/2001 - Blasthaus Gallery, (San Fransisco), Knitting Factory (New York), Art and Architetcure Conference (Tasmania), Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Dunedin)

Scott Weir, B. Arch., M. Arch.

Scott Weir produces and investigates peripheral architecture emerging from new technologies and cultural shifts. His most recent project entitled QUINTOPOLIS brings together gay porn, circuit parties, drug use and western Christianity under the auspices of a guidebook to the reborn cities of the plain. Other works include the collaborations Greylands (.com, with Artengine and KIT, 1999) and Queers in Space (1994). His work has appeared in Parachute (#96, 1999), Sandbox (#7, 1999), Virtualia (fall 1999), Canadian Forum (Aug. 1999), Not At Home (1996), SITES (#26, 1995), Assemblage (#24, 1994), Metropolis (Oct. 1994), and L’Arca (Sept. 1994)..

Contact :
DX Raiden - dxraiden@hotmail.com
KIT - wadewalker@mailcity.com