... it's still up until tomorrow!

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Limitations Permitted
http://www.ambienttv.net/content/?q=limitationspermitted

Peckham Square, London SE15
until 28 June 2009, 10am-6pm, free

Site-specific mixed media installation by Manu Luksch, Neal White and
FLIX: the fourth Peckham Space commission.

Limitations Permitted invites us to consider the erosion of our civil liberties. For one week, The Office of Experiments will place a kiosk on Peckham Square. Staffed by a new type of security person, the kiosk will distribute field guides that suggest alternative ways to assess activities on the Square. A viewing device in the kiosk will show films by Manu Luksch, FLIX and those responding to an open call. The stereoskopic 3D films deploy British Sign Language and dramatic scenarios to reveal the bye-laws that regulate public space.

Transport:
Buses: 343 from London Bridge
78 from Liverpool Street/Aldgate
12, 171 from Elephant & Castle
36, 436 from Victoria/Oval
Rail: Peckham Rye and Queens Road direct from London Bridge

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How do we respond, psychologically and behaviourally, to different public and private spaces? Spaces carry particular histories and are inscribed by rules, both overt and tacit. Libraries, playgrounds and shopping malls appear to be benign zones, but they are also spaces under observation that generate information about the people who inhabit them, through CCTV cameras, library card readers and ATMs. Discrepancies and deviations from the norm are noted and corrected.

Limitations Permitted interprets for the general public some of the laws and bye-laws that regulate the space of Peckham Square. The central 'Kiosk' in Peckham Square will be staffed for eight hours each day by a new type of security person who will be available to talk to the public. Inviting us to consider our civil liberties or voice our response to the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, they will also distribute local information suggesting alternative ways to navigate the environment. Several silent short films are displayed in a hand-held device that envelops and focuses the gaze like a ViewMaster. While bye-laws are inscribed into the featured public spaces through use of British Sign Language, dramatic scenarios that interrogate those laws unfold in the background (scripted and acted by FLIX).
Sign language, having been a language that was repressed, has strong associations in the deaf community with freedom and rebellion. In 1880, at an international conference in Milan it was ruled that oral (spoken) education was better for deaf people than manual (signed) education, and they passed a resolution to ban sign language. So for many people it is the language of liberation, of refusal to accept the status quo, of a connection with your identity that rejects the one that has been imposed upon you, particularly the 'medical' view of deafness as something to be 'cured', for the deaf person to become 'normal'. Sign language has still no legal status, but can be 'overheard' by CCTV. (Damien Robinson)

Many of the laws and bye-laws that apply to public space existed prior to the incorporation of the EU Convention on Human Rights into the UK Human Rights Act 1998, and have yet to be challenged in light of legal and social change. But compliance with the 1998 Act is insufficient as a guarantor of liberties: the title Limitations Permitted refers to the frequent accessory clauses 1998 Act that allow the rights conferred to be restricted under 'specified circumstances'.