At the present time there are many areas of the UK where no cell phone signal can be accessed. Such areas, on the one hand, represent nothing more than a failing of the 3G network - breaks in the infrastructure that will soon be rectified by the next wave of cell phone technology. But on the other, the dead zones are pockets of resistance, territories where the drive towards connectivity has yet to penetrate. In this light the zones take on a certain allure and seem to stand for everything we desire from the landscape. Only in the dead zone can we separate ourselves from the position of outsider and enter a world where language has no meaning. Once in the dead zone, however, communication is lost and the internal, assimilated experience cannot be represented. From outside, the landscape is configured as object of the subject’s gaze but within there is no spatial distance for this to be possible.

In this project the 3G network is used to broadcast live from the edge of the dead zones. Battery packs are used to power a webcam and portable router, and a signal booster is used to maximise the 3G signal. At the edge of the dead zone signal strength is low and the broadcast reduced to less than one frame per second. During the broadcast, the webcam capture is made available via the link below - a slowly relayed live feed from the threshold of 3G technology. The examples included here are landscapes that, beyond the usable signal threshold, remain intact as ‘wilderness’ territories - zones of outsider space that conjure an idea of unmitigated nature.