All Boundary Roads

I decided to do the ‘walk’ along every road named Boundary Road, partly as nostalgia for the first ‘shopping street’ remembered (pushed there in pram and more recently walked to hundreds of times since  – they could scatter me there after death) – however this walk was a confinement version using googlemaps – stroking a touchpad rather than striding along –  it being a case of any port in a storm in these situations – virus laws guidance and caution making this mass of streets temporarily inaccessible as a fabled Forbidden City / Lost World / Hidden Earth

daily trips

an approximate gazetteer conjured in pixels 

creating the world’s double  – a bargain golem

this action a minor stream flowing backwards through the surveillance channels

transforming my peripheral cell into the panopticon’s central observation tower

at first seemed like a pointless and pallid exercise – no way to pick up an object / smell the air / buy a pasty from Julie’s Cafe – no presence in the space  – no there becoming here then once again there as steps and breaths are made 

but noted after a while that the images of streets traversed in this way persisted like a microdose of dreams – odd items retained from the silt of the restricted letterbox drift – twilight wall of lives in the quiet windows of low-rise flats – small triangles of wild land – cherry trees older than the houses – wagon wheel mounted on a terraced house sounding to forgotten frontiers

 – two dead Christmas trees outside a garage opposite a medical device factory – the way graveyards and disused gasometers make stretches of open sky  – 

an invocation. 

detritus of the google vehicle process – sudden shifts – blurred trapezoids hover in the air – ghost map on each click – summer becomes autumn in a single step – graffiti appears and is erased – figures striding the end of the boundary – blur faced cyphers become my fellow walkers trapped in the past – pedestrian bilocation – all included in the process

figured out a way to do the field notes – locate each Boundary Road with its postcode + write a line describing something seen there + search the digital traces of the location and scrape some found text – thus let some language emerge from this broken-sidelong view of the network 

trying to imagine all these roads as one long

road flowing from north to south to the first

road I remembered

• despite some having dead ends some being circular 
• assemblage cut-up and wormhole training coming in handy
• one hell of a crazy road

logged 89 ‘Boundary Road’ signs

each a two-word paradox 

boundary : drawing a line of furthest limit : dividing the world in two

road : laying an open way : connecting to next things