1. DRIVE-THROUGH

From our
many orbits of London, driving in and out of the city limits, we
have become enthusiastic connoisseurs of the landscapes created
where open country rubs up against pockets of suburbia and the
city’s transport networks. In terms of scale, texture
and animation, these places are unique. They contain unregulated
tracts of land, put to eclectic use, which present intriguing
vistas full of brutal thresholds. And although these are lonely
places, removed from the city proper, they are populated (albeit
transiently) by the thousands of people who daily speed through
them in their vehicles. But what happens if you leave your vehicle?
Outside our car – unshielded, un-power-assisted – exploring
hard shoulders, climbing motorway embankments, standing under
flight paths, we found ourselves exhilarated. It’s thrilling
to be so out of scale with the massive shapes and high velocities
of these frontier environments, to feel free of the city and
yet reconnected to it in a way that is raw, visceral.
The turbulent,
wreckage-strewn perimeter of the city demarcates more than just
its physical edges. It also represents a transition in the landscape’s invisible characteristics: a change
in its air chemistry, its temperature, and the density of its
electromagnetic space of media channels and data networks. Approaching
London, a dormant car radio will crackle into life as the city’s
radio stations come within range – the pop and hiss of
the patchy radio ‘landscape’ analogous to the fragmented
texture of the visual landscape beyond the windscreen.

Where
we drove

A view through the windscreen
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