Territory By Kevin Slavin, Area/code

 This essay is an extract from a brief for ‘Territory’, a Fabrica Workshops project. This is a new program of research and education activities based around the environmental, social and relational. Treviso, Italy, May 2008.

“The Berlin Wall should be 5 centimeters higher, for aesthetic reasons”.
(Joseph Beuys)

You can see the walls plainly in Treviso, from the ground, from the map, from Google’s big optics. For those of you who live here, your primary forms of engagement with these walls are probably aesthetic. You might think, like Beuys, that they should be 5 centimeters higher, or 2 meters lower, or you might find the stone lovely, or the forms well articulated. But every wall has a history, and cities learn to build them from their enemies, not their friends.

Cities have always dreamed of autonomy, and walls are one material for those dreams. Designed to withstand siege and to regulate immigration and trade, city walls were built only under the “right of fortification” granted by the nation-state. City walls are the archaic hardware of national territory; the Latin for city (urbs) refers to the wall’s stones.
With city walls, the territories are defined from the inside, as a line of defense. But some walls are defined from the outside, as when Venice drew the stone lines to hard-code the Jewish Ghetto. Sometimes territory is declared by its inhabitants, and sometimes territory is declared for them.

But walls are only the most obvious boundaries. Not all territory is visible from the ground or the map or the lens of the satellite. Sometimes there are only traces, one needs to learn how to read them. We’ll look at cases in which a thin roll of wire is enough, in the American West and in cities around the world. Sometimes it’s even thinner than a wire, maybe just a sticker, maybe just the layer of paint that marks gang turf. And sometimes it’s invisible altogether. A lot of territory exists only in the air or in the mind.

The territory in the air reflects the overall shift from the power of the visible (like a wall) to the power of the invisible (like a firewall). Consider the practice of “pirate radio” in which a signal is legal to transmit on one side of a border, but illegal to receive on the other. Radio waves have a territory all their own, with boundaries that are real but invisible, unconcerned with the lines on the map. Sometimes the invisible territories conform to geography (as a Chinese Google search will reveal) but more frequently they don’t.
When the Roman Empire expanded and congealed into cities, they were always based on a grid, always the same grid, always aligned to the very same compass points. The gridded cities embodied the endless terrain of the empire, even if the space between the cities was unarticulated. Some 2,000 years later, however, Roman citizens were panicked by a camera-equipped “Google Car” as it passively mapped the streets for Google StreetView. It’s one thing to impose an endless grid upon the world, and another thing to have a grid imposed upon you, even when the grid is invisible. Especially when it’s invisible. Territory is like this: you don’t have to see it to know it’s there.
For many of us, our first group social experiences were children’s street games. Red Rover. British Bulldog, Kick the Can, “Red Light, Green Light”. There was a lot to learn from these games: teams are arbitrary, and not, victory is random, and not, and it’s fun and games, and not. Beyond all that, however, these games are built around temporary “consensual hallucinations” in which we all agree that this is the center of the world, this is one side or the other, this is the goal, this is the jail. When the game is over, the territories revert back to whatever they were, a schoolyard, a basement, the sidewalk. Our early experiments in group socialization are built around imagining territory and then agreeing on its real-world boundaries, which will live on earth only as long as we imagine them.

In the end, most of the territory on earth lives only there, as the mental images in the minds of its citizens. When Korzybski first coined the phrase “The Map is not the Territory” in 1931, he was referring to the cognitive error of believing our abstractions of the world to be the world itself, mistaking the word for the thing. Territory seems to start with stone walls, but it starts with the plans for those walls, and it starts before those plans with the belief that the lines of that plan are meaningful. Territory really starts with someone reading those lines on the earth, or with writing them.

©2008

Kevin Slavin is co-founder, with Frank Lantz, of New York, game and media design company Area/code. http://www.playareacode.com/.

Fabrica is the Benetton communication research center in Treviso, Italy. The Workshops Program is directed by Omar Vulpinari, who is also Head of Visual Communication at Fabrica.
http://www.fabrica.it/workshops/past.html

For the response essay by Limited Language, see adjacent post ‘Captured? World on the move’.