Tim Sharp
Devil’s Hill is a layered architecture pointing to our present future, a marker for the beginning of a topsy-turvy world —from my point of view, that is— I’m becoming increasingly aware that each generation understands ‘normality’ with a different base line. So in my case municipally-owned housing, public transport, social medicine, education and communally owned electricity, gas, water etc. has to a large extent been turned on its head. Instead of the economy being embedded in the social fabric the reverse seems to be increasingly true. So the base of this hill is a relatively recent fortress that embodies an inward and backward-looking concept of territorial invasion, occupation and colonial administration packaged as an educational keep dedicated to the arts and crafts of war. On the very top, though, things are much more ephemeral, signals—radar and radio—were captured and transmitted by technology cloaked in secrecy and with products invisible to the human eye. I spy… takes on a new meaning. But in terms of intelligence gathering this level of technology has been downgraded over the years. Surveillance and intel collection have moved outward, into space, with high definition satellite cameras and advanced signal interception technology based in the web. At the same time, it has come closer, become more intimate and mundane, potentially insinuating itself into our private lives and spaces as surveillance capitalism. Our social interaction, financial transactions, physical movements and creative ideas are tracked and analysed for patterns, tendencies and proclivities. Our houses, telephones and cars are serving up our data, in chunks or crumbs, and contributing to the creation of integrated webs of information about us,
our friends and our activities. Consent has become one of the constitutive deceits of modern commerce which is no longer a series of transactions but a commitment to life- long exploitation. In theory, signing a document signifies agreement. In fact, due to the imbalances of power, access to the law and financial resources, it often confirms our impotence and delivers, along with the goods and services it supplies, an insidious and painless digital enslavement. Our private territory is being appropriated. In the twenty-first century most of us have become members of an Indigenous Nation of Relatively Powerless Users. It’s perhaps what you would expect from a culture that treasures its basic tenet: if you can keep it, it’s yours. Your land, your slave, your continent, your data, your market; the ‘invisible hand’ that guides us is that of the professional thief with a data habit that must be fed. The shadows are lengthening now, the guide has left me to it and will close the gate at sundown he says. I sit on a low wall on the roof thinking just how little of the essence inside the radomes is reflected in images. Whatever the camera is able to capture is automatically supplemented by what I already know, visually and aurally, but that is invisible to a viewer. It also occurs to me that this child of the Berlin Air Lift and a decade of Cold War was all part of a containment strategy by governments, especially the USA, to ensure that any socialist (not to say communist) tendencies abroad were quarantined and those at home crushed. Anti-Communism provided an ideal fear focus and a clear red line; Senator McCarthy with his witch hunts, the second batch of the twentieth century, was
14 on site review 46 :: travel
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator