Glitching Digital Borders: Artists and New Border Systems

With the rise of new digitised technologies at the nation-state border, the border itself has become more difficult to identify, demanding new tools and methods to recognize it and intervene. In this paper, we explore how artists are being impacted by borders but also how they respond, critique and interfere. Artists have long been experimenting, breaching, and revealing the weakness of the border, both in terms of symbolic borders like categorical associations and the nation-state border. Artistic interventions into conventional, physical borders include painting the border invisible, simulating the border, rendering a border permeable via audio technology and designing seesaws with which people on either side of the wall can interact. But how can artists respond to new digitised border technologies? How can they react to a border that is no longer symbolising a “line-in-the-sand,” but a border that is “everywhere”?

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Ayodamola Okunseinde

Christoffer Horlitz

Ella Hillström

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 324-329

Affiliations

[0001]The New School Parsons

New York, USA

[0002]Mercator Research Fellow

Berlin, Germany

[0003]The New School for Social Research

New York, USA

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.43

SO-VID: ffc65955-af85-4400-a6f3-82c632c4916c

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.43

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] B Ajana (2015) Augmented borders: Big Data and the Ethics of Immigration Control. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 13(1), 58–78.

[2] J Baudrillard (2019) Simulacra and simulations (1981). J In Baudrillard, (Eds.) Crime and Media, 69–85. Routledge, Milton Park.

[3] Z Bauman, & D Lyon (2013) Liquid surveillance: A conversation. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.

[4] W Benjamin (1935) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Penguin, London.

[5] B Bratton (2015) The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, Cambridge.

[6] T Braun (2021). Interview by Ella Hillström [Zoom] August 26.

[7] D Broeders (2011) A European “Border” Surveillance System under Construction. H In Dijstelbloem, A Meijer, (Eds.) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

[8] H Clinton (2013) CNN: Clinton touts ’smart power’ in farewell talk. Available from: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/31/politics/clinton/index.html ( 27 August 2021 )

[9] G Deleuze (2017) Postscript on the Societies of Control (pp. 35–39). Routledge, Milton Park.

[10] R Ezzaldeen (2019). Interview by Ella Hillström [Skype], September 24.

[11] M Foucault (2007) Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Duke University Press, Durham.

[12] B Larkin (2004) Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy. Public Culture, 16 (2) 289–314.

[13] D Lyon (2005) The border is everywhere: ID cards, surveillance and the other. E In Zureik, M Salter, (Eds.) Global Surveillance and Policing. Willan, London.

[14] A M’charek, K Schramm, & D Skinner (2014) Topologies of Race. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 39(4), 468–487.

[15] M Madden (2017) Privacy, Security, and Digital Inequality. Available from: http://datasociety.net/library/privacy-security-and-digital-inequality/#_ftn2 ( 15 August 2021 )

[16] S Mattern (2018) All Eyes on the Border. Places Journal, September 2018. Available from: http://placesjournal.org/article/all-eyes-on-the-border/ ( 15 August 2021 )

[17] D Miller, H Horst A. (2020). The digital and the human: A prospectus for digital anthropology. In Digital anthropology. Routledge, Milton Park.

[18] A Ong, S Collier (2008) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.

[19] A Paulikevitch (2021). Interview by Ayodamola Okunseinde, [Zoom], August 12.

[20] Pew Research Center (2021) Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet. http://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband/?menuItem=480dace1-fd73-4f03-ad88-eae66e1f4217 ( 5 January 2022 ).

[21] H Steyerl (2015). The Terror of Total Dasein. Economies of Presence in the Art Field. DIS magazine. http://dismagazine.com/discussion/78352/the-terror-of-total-dasein-hito-steyerl/ ( 15 August 2021 )

[22] Topak, Ö. (2014) The New Borders of the European Union: Digital Surveillance and Sorting. In OkyayuzM, HerrmannP, (Eds.) Migration Global Processes Caught in National Answers. Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung, Vienna.

[23] World Economic Forum (2017) 7 ways to make travel safer. http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/02/7-ways-to-make-travel-safer ( 5 January 2022 )

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