2004 Rockefeller New Media Foundation Proposal

Abstract

Offshore, an exhibition and website, is the fictional media counterpoint to a non-fiction book I have just completed titled Terra Incognita. Terra Incognita, travels around the world looking at formulaic spatial products in difficult political situations. While generally considered to be politically immune formats of neoliberal magistrates and their business counterparts, these products are also the tools of rogue nations, cults, and other impresarios. Far from banal, they can become political pawns and even instruments of aggression, storing new myths, desires and symbolic capital in a complex spatial cocktail. Terra Incognita visits six such cocktails: tourism in North Korea, fantastic forms of sovereignty in commercial and religious franchises, high-tech agricultural formations in, automated global ports, microwave urbanism in India's IT enclaves and the global industry of building implosion. These runaway stories, found in the international pages of the newspapers and the global news wires, create something like footnoted fiction in a book of political misadventures.