(Eavesdropping equipment on Ascension Island, operated by Britain's spy agency. Photo by Simon Norfolk.)

Simon Norfolk's thesis is straightforward: landscape is a function of war.

In parts of London, for instance, “the Roman stones are still buried beneath the modern tarmac. Crucially, it needs to be understood that the road system built by the Romans was their highest military technology, their equivalent of the stealth bomber or the Apache helicopter - a technology that allowed a huge empire to be maintained by a relatively small army that could move quickly and safely along these paved, all-weather roads. It is extraordinary that London, a city that ought to be shaped by Tudor kings, the British Empire, Victorian engineers and modern international Finance, is a city fundamentally drawn, even to this day, by abandoned Roman military hardware.”

So not by island-making tectonics, alluvial scouring, gravitational erosion, photosynthesis, or even supernatural wizardry.


(What if Walter de Maria was an ECHELON Artist-in-Residence at Ascension. Photo by Simon Norfolk.)


(An American radar station sifts through terrabytes of electronic information as it stands guard a makeshift cemetery of dead sailors from centuries past. Photo by Simon Norfolk.)

It's no surprise then that Simon Norfolk went on an enviable trip to Ascension in the South Atlantic.

Where it seems that the paradisical-sounding island is not simply an occasional lithic extension of the Earth but a gigantic surveillance machine: a weaponized island. Hardwared and networked into the global ECHELON infrastructure to eavesdrop on each and every communication of each and every person on the planet. What is spoken in the caves of Afghanistan is readily picked up in Ascension.

Certainly for some, a manufactured Fantasy Island.


(A BBC World Service relay station. Photo by Simon Norfolk.)


(An American antennae oddly reminiscent of London's Millennium Dome. Photo by Simon Norfolk.)

I'm certainly left to wonder: which came first — the island or ECHELON?

In the Archives:
Lithic surveillance
Dugway Proving Ground: or, TerraServer, Part IV

(Spotted at Some landscapes.)