ABSTRACT
A slip road roundabout carves out a section of the landscape, creates an island, a boarder territory designated by technological flow and speed. Inaccessible; separated by asphalt and fast moving vehicular circulations. Legislated and enacted by a topographic rationality. This very precision of demarcation produces an ambiguous domain severed from its continuity. It is a state of other not so much the catastrophic plunge from social contiguity suffered by Maitland, the protagonist of J. G. Ballards short novel Concrete Island. It is more the enigmatic subtraction of a domain from the ordinary in the vein of Andrei Tarkovskys film Stalker, a zone of the uncanny divorced from the quotidian, an atmosphere of unease in the familiar that is bounded, that is de-legitimated in its essence, that is dis-connected. This sense is compounded by the approach required to penetrate the island, which is illegal, dangerous and engenders a mimesis of the focus of the stalker.
