The Context
In a world afraid there are fewer escape routes. The screen flickering in the corner of your lounge 24 hours a day, has been colonised to become the primary mechanism for delivering instantaneous and globalised fear. These screens are also the means for controlling vast geographic tracts in the most efficient manner, they cause a compression of this geography.
These geographic tracts are inhabited by disbursed and frightened individuals either contained within the perimeter or outside of it. Those within the perimeter, the citizens, have a strong need to feel safe and are protected by a myriad of systems. The ones who dwell beyond the perimeter either physically or theoretically are regarded as others. They are apart from the inclusiveness of the perimeter and they exist in a zone where everything has been outsourced or ‘EXCLUDED from multipolar internationality…’ (p109 Virilio, P. City Of Panic. 2007. Berg, New York)
The citizens are protected by one eyed cameras, 24 hours a day as they huddle in front of their screens. This pan-optic watching device has been calibrated to deliver instant and lethal force to the Others or those outside of the perimeter.
As an accidental result of geographic compression, local fears become globalised and islands of fear have begun to be woven into the fabric of civic mechanisms. These islands of fear result in unpredictable, questionable and sometimes even dangerous actions from those mechanisms that are designed to protect the citizens.
One key problem with instantaneous protection systems is that it is difficult to exclude, to 100% efficiency, the accident from them. With sufficient time, space for reflection and with measured and careful construction this accuracy can be increased and accidents avoided. However in the current supermodern context, time, reflection and methodical construction have become regarded as luxuries not to indulge if safety and control is to be guaranteed. Especially from the Others that dwell outside of the perimeter.
In order to maintain the perimeter the citizens must be perpetually productive. The performance of citizens is measured against that of machines and increasingly by machines. These machines are also in a constant state of acceleration, whereby according to Moore's law performance must double every 24 months. This pace of acceleration is imposed upon the citizens, failure to maintain the pace of performance results in banishment beyond the perimeter.
The machines speak in binary, the language of efficiency. And in order to keep up increasingly the citizens are turning toward binary communication. The machines logic circuits are designed to handle this kind of binary communication system, however this triggers distortions to the logic circuits of the citizens. These become fractured by binary communication, behaviors become infected by binary logic, relativity is quarantined. As fear is amplified in this context distortions and accidents increase wildly both in the behaviors of the citizens and the mechanisms that are designed to protect them.
Much as a disease manifests itself in a series of sometimes unrelated symptoms, the distortions that trigger the work manifest themselves in a series of states such as dislocation, detachment from time and space, logic interruptions and unexplained paranoia.
