fromCONCENTRATE

Legal boundaries are often determined in respect of private ownership of land and property and are typically ascribed by the simultaneous use of physical boundaries – walls, fences, gates etc.

What happens if the physical boundary is removed or disappears or deteriorates?

The answer it would seem, is that the legal boundary, lacking its physical scaffold, is prone to demise, and the previously ‘private’ property risks falling into public domain. A simple strategy for combating this undesired collapse of law is to give notification of the established legal boundary whilst also making a symbolic gesture towards the previous physical boundary through the use of small markers.

In this way spaces can give the visible and physical impression of being ‘public’ whilst, at the same time, remaining psychologically, legally, economically and physically ‘private’.

The simple brass studs in the video above allude to the outline of a previous structure which, whilst no longer present, is still able to retain territorial supremacy by invoking law – in this case The Highways ACT 1959.

Regarding the Highways Act 1959 – the Office of Public Sector Information has no record of such an act in their 1959 archive. Further investigation reveals that the act was superseded and repealed with the introduction of the Highways Act 1980.

The situation above presents us with an imaginary building and a sign pointing to a vanished law.

In November 2009, television news reports from the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall returned to our screens, 20 years on, like retinal after images. The Berlin Wall had not been a mere boundary marker but a globally visible, physical, manifestation of a global scale political impasse. The transgression and fall of the wall are now seen as emblematic of the groundswell political changes sweeping Eastern Bloc countries at that time.

In advance of our trip to Berlin for Transmediale, I want to consider some contemporary boundaries and how they manifest.

What (if anything) might contemporary boundaries be symbolic manifestations of?

A couple of months ago I saved a link to a ‘Virtual Berlin Wall’ project but now that I return to the link it directs me to the ‘Google’ web search home page – this anomaly takes this blog post off at a tangent…

Virtual Berlin wall launched to commemorate walls http://tinyurl.com/ydl2oqp 3:47 AM Nov 9th from web

There are three possible reasons for this unexpected outcome:

1. – it is simply a dead link and ‘Google’ is the ‘in browser’ default
2. – this is a smartass conceptual art joke
3. – the ‘error’ is some kind of freudigital slip

I choose to believe all three of the above reasons to be correct.

Google is a kind of global digital interfacing membrane, which applies top secret filtration algorithms in order to control, administer and record the exchange of information on the internet.

Today’s withdrawal of Google from the Chinese ‘market’ on grounds of ongoing state censorship is seen by political commentators as a gesture towards a western democratic moral and political highground.

Despite Google’s seeming omnipotence, the vast majority of internet users seem to perceive Google, less as an oppressive ‘wall’ rather, as a benevolent ‘gateway’. For many, Google is a symbol of free, easy access to information and, as such, Google is more analogous in popular consciousness to the Brandenburg Gate than the Berlin Wall.

Brandenburg Gate image used under licence from Wikimedia Commons.

Links:

Google and China: a cynical ploy or a principled stand? – Charlie Beckett, Director POLIS

Google and China: What’s the real story, and where does it go from here? – Mac Slocum. O’Reilly Radar