Dominic Hand - Buffer Zone

This book-length prose poem imagines the hypothetical global scenario wherein the crash of multiple systems is recorded by and recovered from a black box. The instruments of technological supremacy - digital and virtual programmes, automated industries, unmanned munitions - fail to transcend their material foundations. In turn, the cycles of social and ecological disruptions they induce obstruct mechanized flows, trigger blackouts and malfunctions.Composed of a single rolling paragraph written entirely in the second person, Buffer Zone, careens along a series of nested loops. As machines hallucinate patterns in information, rings within rings entangle in topological confusion: oceanic gyres propel shoals of fish; aircraft get stuck in holding patterns over runways; crowds circumambulate a temple; a circle of grey dots rotates at the centre of a screen.Within a planetary archive of extinction events, data storage units become burial crypts, and the memory of catastrophe survives in these crash cases, on the internet, in the cloud, in waves. Buffer Zone repossesses the alternative spaces produced by buffering, the interstices spawned from glitches, the ambiguous zones of blurs.

This is part of a new series of Veer Books to be produced and published jointly in the University of Surrey and the CPRC, Birkbeck College.