Matteo Guidi & Giuliana Racco
The Artist and the Stone
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The Artist and the Stone is a multilayered interdisciplinary project that literally negotiates the twofold movement of a subject (a performance artist) and an object (a 25-ton block of stone) from the same refugee camp in the south West Bank to Europe. The project is concerned with the ways people can bypass restrictions and limitations in their daily life, managing to move through systems imposed on them, creating their own paths, languages and forms of expression, driven by their desires.

The Artist and the Stone speaks of mobility, citizenship, desire and constraint, situating itself at a cross-section of considerations on the expanding role of (artistic) mobility, growing border restrictions, and the trade of goods across borders, while placing emphasis on how context dictates value.

Giuliana Racco (Toronto, Canada, 1976). Artist with a BFA (Honours) from Queen’s University and an MFA from the IUAV University of Venice (2006). She was awarded a research and production grant by the Canada Arts Council for the year 2015. Her practice concerns narration, language acquisition, desire and mobility (including that of workers, migrants and refugees).

Matteo Guidi (Cesena, Italy, 1978). Artist with a Diploma in Visual Communication and a Degree in Ethno-anthropology, University of Bologna. He is a member of AAVC (Associaciò Artistes Visuals de Catalunya) and a professor of Sociology of Communication at ISIA of Urbino. He was awarded the Arte para la mejora social 2014 prize by Obra Social La Caixa Foundation. His investigations look into highly imaginative practices in closed spaces of control (such as cooking and photography in prisons).

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Guidi and Racco’s practices converged within the context of factories (2008) and refugee camps in the West Bank (2012). From 2008, they have collaborated continuously and are now both based in Barcelona and  in long-term residency at Hangar (centre for artisticresearch and production).

Guidi and Racco operate at the intersection between art and anthropology, investigating complex contexts of more or less closed structures, i.e. high security prisons, factories, and, most recently, refugee camps. Their practices looks into the ways individuals or groups of  manage their own movement, on a daily basis, through strongly defined systems which tend to objectify them and even induce forms of self-restraint. Reflecting on unpredictable methods of daily resistance sparked by a combination of simplicity and ingenuity, they focus on contexts that are considered marginal or exceptional but, in reality, anticipate more common scenarios.

Together and independently they have participated in exhibitions and festivals and held talks in international contexts, such as the Goethe Institute of Barcelona (ES), GalleriaPiù, Bologna (IT), Department of Justice of Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona (ES), AB9 Murcia (ES), Faculty of Fine Arts of the city of Porto (PT), University of Barcelona (ES), Escola Massana Barcelona (E), Kunstuniversität Linz (AT), Il vivaio del malcantone, Firenze (IT), Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Rome (IT), Double Room, Trieste (IT), Galerija SIZ Rijeka, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (HR), Akademie der Künste der Welt Cologne (DE), International Academy Of Art Palestine, Ramallah (PS), Artissima Lido, Turin Contemporary Art Fair (IT), Galleria Civica Mestre (IT), NotGallery, Naples (I), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Festival Loop, Barcelona (ES), SESC de Artes – Mediterrane São Paulo (BR), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg (FR), Bethnal Green Road, London (UK) and the Center For Design Resarch & Education of Hanyang University, Kyunggido (KR).

They have participated in international research and residency programmes in Portugal (Soft Control / The Technical Unconsciuos); West Bank (Campus in Camps / DAAR Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency Bethlehem); Croatia (Kamova Rijeka); Israel (JCVA Jerusalem Center for Visual Art); Italy (O’, Milan & Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice) and Luxemburg (Kulturfabrik, Esch-sur-Alzette). They have conducted workshops in a variety of environments, including universities, prisons and refugee camps.

Photograph from the set of the video ¿Qui assumirà el pes de 25 tones de pedra? (Who will take on the weight of 25 tonnes of stone?), M. Guidi, G. Racco, 2015 – Photograph by Alice Daneluzzo.

Julian Oliver
Border Bumping
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Border Bumping, by is a work of dislocative media that situates cellular telecommunications infrastructure as a disruptive force, challenging the integrity of national borders.

Running a freely available, custom-built smartphone application, Border Bumping agents collect cell tower and location data as they traverse national borders in trains, cars, buses, boats or on foot. Moments of discrepancy at the edges are logged and uploaded to the central Border Bumping server, at the point of crossing.

For instance: a user is in Germany but her device reports she is in France. The Border Bumping server will take this report literally and the French border is redrawn accordingly. The ongoing collection and rendering of these disparities results in an ever evolving record of infrastructurally antagonised territory, a tele-cartography.

Julian Oliver is a New Zealander, Critical Engineer and artist based in Berlin. His work and lectures have been presented at many museums, galleries, international electronic-art events and conferences, including the Tate Modern, Transmediale, the Chaos Computer Congress, Ars Electronica, FILE and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Julian has received several awards, most notably the distinguished Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica 2011 for the project Newstweek (with Daniil Vasiliev).

Julian has also given numerous workshops and master classes in software art, data forensics, creative hacking, computer networking, counter-surveillance, object-oriented programming for artists, augmented reality, virtual architecture, video-game development, information visualisation and UNIX/Linux worldwide. He is an advocate of Free and Open Source Software and is a supporter of, and contributor to, initiatives that promote and reinforce rights in the networked domain.

Articles about Julian’s work, or work he’s made with others, have appeared in many news channels. Among them are The BBC (UK), The Age (AU), Der Spiegel (DE), El Pais (ES), Liberation (FR), The New York Times (US), La Vanguardia (ES), The Guardian Online (UK), Cosmopolitan (US), Wired (US and UK), Slashdot (US), Boing Boing (US), Computer World (World) and several television stations worldwide.

Prof. Huub Dijstelbloem
Border surveillance and counter surveillance

The concept of surveillance is usually applied to state activities and technologies that aim to register and control certain populations. However, historically the concept of surveillance refers to the initiatives of citizens to control state power as well. This project will study the interaction between surveillance and counter surveillance in the context of border control and mobility management. One the one hand, it aims to investigate recent initiatives in Europe and the United States to digitalize border controls and to extend their operational range from a conceptual, normative and empirical point of view. On the other, it studies how ‘watch dogs’ such as NGOs and humanitarian organizations which support refugees and aim to protect privacy and human rights respond to the specific challenge of border surveillance. In addition, the project researches various initiatives by artist, activists and academics (often in combination) that aim to visualize issues relate to border control. As a result, the project aims to gain more insight in how debates in the public sphere take place in a visual and often technologically mediated way and how the digitalization of border controls affects the nature of surveillance and counter surveillance. As such, the study will offer a deeper understanding of the nature of checks and balances in contemporary highly technological democracies. In order to do so, the project will compare examples of surveillance and counter surveillance at the Southern borders of Europe and the US and identify initiatives of visualizing and counter-visualizing at the Greece-Turkey border and at the US-Mexican border.

Outline

History and philosophy of technology increasingly pay attention to the technological dimension of state formation and the technicalities of the state apparatus. In addition, studies at the intersection of philosophy of science, political philosophy and science and technology studies have emphasized that issues concerning technology and the state relate to questions of democracy as well as they affect the way citizens are included or excluded from state’s activities or the public sphere.

An area in which all these issues are present is the surveillance of borders. Technologies have highly influenced the functioning and meaning of borders and borders control. Three transformations are significant in this respect.

Firstly, border checks do not always take place at entry points such as physical frontiers, harbors and airports, but form part of a much wider area of monitoring, admission requirements and administrative processes; for example, the illegality checks done via personal data registration. Border are increasingly instruments of ‘remote control’. Arguably, the border is omnipresent, as well as portable (ID card) and virtual (databases). As a consequence, the border is not just a wall erected to protect ‘Fortress Europe’ from advancing migrants, but the EU’s new digital borders are connected through the screens of border officials, police, visa offices etc.

Secondly, border control is not only carried out by governments. There may be co-operation with, for example, medical professionals (for X-rays and DNA laboratories to determine family relations) and private business (such as the Schiphol Group, that collaborates in the program Privium on iris scans). Some policy developments in this area are also supported and driven by private industries. The ‘Homeland security market’ has grown considerably in more recent years. Border control is not only in public hands but also in professional and private hands.

Thirdly, border control increasingly targets the human body. The external characteristics of migrants are not only presented in terms of descriptions (height, eye color) in data files; actual imprints of the body such as fingerprints are increasingly finding their way into bureaucratic systems, making bodies ‘machine readable’. The body is interpreted and formatted as if it were an information storage device that simply needs to be scanned in order to be registered. The body becomes ‘the universal ID card of the future’ and indeed, the body functions more and more as a lie detector that can accuse and condemn people but also acquit them.

As a result, border control and mobility management have become part of a large scale surveillance regime. They include not only migrants of all sorts but citizens and so-called ‘trusted travellers’ as well. Policies aim to combine the free movement of people, goods, money and information with security measures to safeguard borders and prevent illegal activities. Attention gradually shifts from ‘representing’ to ‘intervening’ now that different sorts of technologies are concerned with profiling, risk analysis and pre-emptive strikes. A recent example is the ‘intelligence-driven’ approach Eurosur (European Border Surveillance System) which became operational December 2, 2013 and coordinates technologies varying from ships, helicopters and radar to biometrics and databases.

The interoperability of databases making use of biometrics combined with iris scans, GIS technology, radar images, infrared and satellite technology, and statistical risk calculation creates a surveillance network to store and exchange all kinds of data extracted from migrants and travellers. The more recent development of big data analysis is now also increasingly finding its way into public policy making. The state’s perception of reality thus becomes more technologically and statistically ‘datafied’.

This digitalization and datafication is not without consequences for the way watchdogs act. Counter surveillance can be distinguished in vigilance, denunciation and evaluation. It often takes place in decentralized and mediated ways such as by media coverage, internet forums, social media, and NGOs that act as an in between in the public sphere between states and citizens. As such, surveillance and counter surveillance do not consist of a centralized public confrontation between citizens and the state but of a distributed network of technological formats and dispersed places in which this relationship is re-enacted. This re-enactment results in a process of representing in trajectories that connect migrants, data, computers, fingerprints, bodies and civil servant. In those trajectories not only borders but also boundaries between different ‘worlds’ such as political, legal, economic, and moral regimes need to be crossed. As a result, when becoming a public affair the issue of ‘border surveillance’ is related not only to different practices and various forms of knowledge and information but also to different values and worldviews.

The increasing deployment of information technologies not only affects the nature of border controls but the checks and balances of democracies and the nature of the public sphere as well. Digitalized mobility management transforms the relationship between states and people and between policies, interventions and behavior. Technologies applied in border control and mobility management give rise to new questions since they affect migrants’ and travellers’ privacy, bodily integrity, mobility, quality of data, information storage and exchange, and opportunities for correction. In addition, a strengthening of border controls is likely to increase the risks migrants are willing to take to reach their destination.

Migration policy, border control and mobility management are fields in which a clash takes place between state surveillance and counter surveillance by NGOs and human rights organizations. As a consequence, organizations involved with the problems migrants meet in their attempts to cross borders illegally challenge governmental techniques by supplying information on the negative consequences of a restrictive and selective migration policy to media and the public at large. Examples are tactics such as mapping and counter mapping migration routes and refugee camps and the launch of interactive websites that invite the public to report casualties.

The project aims to arrive at a systematic inventory of different forms of counter surveillance and of the different ways watchdogs visualize issues related to border control and mobility management. In doing so, it will study how watchdogs are not only concerned with the representation of specific affairs and the mobilization of public attention, but are also involved with ‘issue formation’ and the shaping of ‘publics’.

Huub Dijstelbloem (dijstelbloem@gmail.com) is Professor in Philosophy of Science and Politics at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and Senior Researcher and Project Leader at the Scientific Council for Government Policy in The Hague (WRR). He studied Philosophy (MA) and Science Dynamics (MSc) in Amsterdam and in Paris at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI, supervision: Prof Bruno Latour) of the Ecole des Mines. He completed his PhD at the UvA at the Department of Philosophy.

Huub is board member of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC) and of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies (IIS) of the UvA. Earlier, he was Program Coordinator Technology Assessment at the Rathenau Institute and researcher at Sci-Quest and editor of the open access journal for contemporary philosophy Krisis. He is involved in public debates about science, technology and democracy and is one of the initiators of the movement Science in Transition.

His recent books and co-edited volumes include Bestemming gewijzigd. Moderniteit en stedelijke transformaties (2013), Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe (Palgrave, 2011), Onzekerheid troef. Het betwiste gezag van de wetenschap (Van Gennep, 2011), Het gezicht van de publieke zaak. Openbaar bestuur onder ogen (Amsterdam University Press, 2010), De Migratiemachine (Van Gennep, 2009) Rethinking the Human Condition. Exploring Human Enhancement (Rathenau, 2008) and Politiek vernieuwen. Op zoek naar publiek in de technologische samenleving (Van Gennep, 2008).

Relevant key publications of principal investigator

Dijstelbloem, H.O. (in press, 2015). ‘Mediating the Med. Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance at the Southern Borders of Europe’, in: J de Bloois, R Celikates & Y Jansen (Eds.), Critical Perspectives on the Irregularisation of Migration in Europe; Detention, Deportation, Death. Rowman and Littlefield.
Broeders, D.W.J. & Dijstelbloem, H.O. (in press, 2015). ‘The datafication of mobility and migration management: the mediating state and its consequences’. In I Van der Ploeg & J Pridmore (Eds.), Digital Identities. Routledge.
Dijstelbloem, H. & Broeders, D. (2014). ‘Border surveillance, mobility management and the shaping of non-publics in Europe’. European Journal of Social Theory. ONLINE FIRST JUNE 2014
Dijstelbloem, H. and A. Meijer (eds.) (2011) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Dijstelbloem, H., A. Meijer and M. Besters (2011) ‘The Migration Machine’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. and A. Meijer (eds.) (2011) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Dijstelbloem, H. A. Meijer and F. Brom (2011) ‘Reclaiming Control over Europe’s Technological Borders’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. and A. Meijer (eds.) (2011) Migration and the New Technological Borders of Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Dijstelbloem, H. (2009) ‘Europe’s new technological gatekeepers. Debating the deployment of technology in migration policy’ (2009), in: Amsterdam Law Forum, special issue on Privacy and Technological Development, August 2009
Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (red.) (2009) De migratiemachine. Over de rol van technologie in het migratiebeleid, Amsterdam: Van Gennep.
Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (2009) ‘Publieke aandacht voor een ongekende machine’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (red.) (2009).
Dijstelbloem, H. (2009) ‘De raderen van de migratiemachine’, in: Dijstelbloem, H. en A. Meijer (red.) (2009).

Heidrun Friese
Partire

Since the late 1990s, Lampedusa has evolved into a European borderland and a key layover for undocumented people. The tiny Italian island close to the Tunisian mainland has become – along with the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla – a prominent symbol of European migration policies, of technocratic utopias of controlling mobility, of border management and of the limits of European hospitality.

Invisible border: the Trans-African Project Organisation
Since 2009
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Since 2009, Invisible Borders has travelled by road across African countries and their borders. Beginning with a trip from Lagos to Bamako, the Organization has travelled further to Addis Ababa, Libreville and Dakar. In 2014, up to 9 artists would travel for at least 150 days from Lagos to Sarajevo, Bosnia.

Project awarded by Prince Claus price.

Jason Davies
Carte du monde divisée par aéroports
Interactive map
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Map of the world divided by airports, realised by Jason Davies (Freelance data visualisation and Computer Science.).

Read the article Political boundaries are just a human demarcation by Aleks Buczkowski on geoawesomeness.com

Charles Heller et Lorenzo Pezzani
Liquid Traces – The Left-to-Die Boat Case
Video, 2014
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Liquide Traces offers a synthetic reconstruction of the events concerning what is known as the “left-to-die boat” case, in which 72 passengers who left the Libyan coast heading in the direction of the island of Lampedusa on board a small rubber boat were left to drift for 14 days in NATO’s maritime surveillance area, despite several distress signals relaying their location, as well as repeated interactions, including at least one military helicopter visit and an encounter with a military ship. As a result, only 9 people survived.

See also Charles Heller’s presentation at the antiAtlas international conference, October 2013

Marcos Ramirez Erre & David Taylor
Delimitations
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Delimitations is a collaborative project by Marcos Ramírez ERRE and David Taylor. During the month of July we will travel from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of Mexico and mark the 1821 border between Mexico and the United States.

That boundary was never surveyed and its brief, 27 year history exists mainly in the form of treaty documents and antique maps. We intend to make it visible for the first time…