2. ENTERING EDGE TOWN  Spread along London’s frontier belt is Edge Town, a sprawling borough of angular structures, many of them inhabited, and machines which sample the tidal flows peculiar to this city-limit environment. Arrays of electronic sensing devices, called ‘noise farmers’, litter the region, clustered around the best vantage points. Noise farmers record the textures and animation of this transitional landscape: micro-landscapes of dust and static, patterns of merging traffic and circling aircraft, flows of pollutants, frequencies of flickering pixels and cell-phone signals. The streams of data generated by these sensors are channelled over electronically irrigated tracts of land, intermingling and thus becoming ever more abstract as they flow from sensor to transmitter to sensor, in vast intermixing daisy chains of devices. Signage provides information about each ‘data climate’, indicating the qualities of the terrain in terms of data flow – for example, whether it’s quiet or turbulent, dormant, unstable, rhythmic. Edge Town’s electro-physical topography affords many different kinds of ownership and inhabitation, from ‘data allotments’ (patches of land visited occasionally to sample certain aspects of the city) to permanent townhouses with gardens. Edge Town living requires housing with high levels of security and noise-proofing, but this necessity is offset by the noise farmers, which translate sections of Edge Town’s road networks and flight paths into fantastic sensorial extensions of the house and garden. Life in Edge Town is not a nightmare of sensory deprivation, but neither is it a nightmare of information overload. Edge Town is a place of enlivening, provocative vistas and cosy domestic shelters – a hilltop vantage point from which to experience the multiplex energy of the city.  Motorway signage animation  Electronic irrigation animation  Example buildings animation  Town plan  Data allotments animation  Data allotments detail
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