February 13-14, 2013
Higher School of Art,
Aix en Provence

This research seminar will discuss the way security and technological escalation have impacted State borders over the last 20 years. It will implement a trans-disciplinary perspective by bringing together human scientists (historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, philosophers, political scientists), hard scientists (artificial intelligence, computer sciences) and artists (webart, hypermedia). In the first workshop, the speakers will discuss the increasingly sophisticated technologies (robots, drones, biometry, technosciences) deployed nowadays along State borders as well as within and beyond these spaces. The socio-historical perspective adopted within the second workshop will help better grasp the processes within which this technological escalation is embedded. Finally, the third workshop will present two trans-disciplinary works discussing the pervasive and diffuse character of border controls. Between biographies and codes, borders pervade human bodies and flows of digital data.

Drones, robots & technoscience

Noël Sharkey (artificial intelligence, University of Sheffield)
Robots at the border: new weapons, new problems?

RYBN.ORG (collectif artistique, Paris)
AAntidatamining: Borders to the test of financialized economy

Charles Heller (filmmaker and writer, Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Forensic Oceanography: subverting surveillance, demanding accountability

Klaus-Gerd Giesen (science politique, Université d’Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand)
The biopolitical normalization of the human: a fractal regulation beyond and below borders” from antiAtlas of Borders

De l’identification à la biométrie / From Identification to Biometry

Martine Kaluszynski (socio-historienne, PACTE, CNRS, Grenoble)
From anthropometric notebook to biometric passeport: Identification, a State building practice

Hidefumi Nishiyama (politics and International Studies, University of Warwick)
Bordering bodies in Imperial Japan and beyond

Gabriel Popescu (geographer, Indiana University, South Bend)
Border bodyscapes and precarious life from antiAtlas of Borders

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (science politique, University of Victoria, Bristish Columbia)
Borders, Theory and Security: the border, here, there, and everywhere

Frontières intrusives/Pervasive borders

Joana Moll (new media artist, Barcelone)
Move and get shot: Surveillance through social networks along the US-Mexico Border

Nick Mai (anthropologist, London Metropolitan University)
Emborder : the biographisation of borders

Jean Cristofol (philosophe, Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence)
Flows, Images and borders

Résumés/Abstracts

1. Noël Sharkey (artificial intelligence, University of Sheffield)
Robots at the border: new weapons, new problems?

The first decades of 21st century will be seen as the age of unmanned vehicles. Since 2002, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in war zones has increased dramatically. Many of these are armed and controlled from thousands of miles away. Now this technology has proliferated to at least 76 countries and there is a massive international market. The developments have expanded to unmanned ships, submarines, cars and ground robots and they are beginning to make an appearance in the civil world with police and border protection agencies. This talk will examine the development of the technology and lead to a discussion about how it might be applied in the future border protection to keep people, keep people out or to keep people in.

2. RYBN.ORG (collectif artistique, Paris)
Antidatamining: Borders to the test of financialized economy

The governance model of the Nation-State is now competing with the management methods of financial capitalism. A number of recent events confirm the strengthening of such trend: the appointment of Mario Monti and Loukas Papadimos in Italy and Greece, the sovereign debt crisis, etc. This redeployment of power requires to redefine and redraw the maps of these ongoing tensions by reassessing the notions of State security, border legislation, suffrage, labor law, tax, and market. This presentation intends to identify the fault lines between financial capitalism and the Nation-State and to inventory the techniques and technologies that are part of this reconfiguration.

3. Charles Heller (filmmaker and writer, Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Forensic Oceanography: subverting surveillance, demanding accountability

In this paper I will present some of the work we have been doing on contentious incidents at sea  and the tools we have developed to account for them within the Forensic Oceanography research project. I will start by contextualising this project by sketching in broad terms the tension between the governance of flow and the partitioning of the seas that characterises maritime governance, the broad geopolitical significance of the Mediterranean and the conditions in which the attempt to control the maritime borders of the EU operates. I will then address in more detail the sensing tools – radars, automated vessel tracking data, satellite imagery – that are central to the “sorting mobilities” in border control within densely travelled areas. I will argue that despite their sophistication, these sensing technologies reach their limits when confronted will the mobility of illegalised migrants. As a matter of fact, the militarisation and technologisation of migration control at sea have revealed to be deadly – over 13.000 cases of migrants deaths have been counted by NGOs. Finally, I will describe our investigation into a particular contentious incident at sea that has allowed us to go beyond counting and denouncing the deaths of migrants at sea and demand accountability.

4. Klaus-Gerd Giesen (science politique, Université d’Auvergne, Clermont Ferrand)
The biopolitical normalization of the human: a fractal regulation beyond and below borders” from antiAtlas of Borders

This presentation aims at analyzing the regulatory attempts introduced by human genetic technoscience at the world scale. Starting with the crisis of dominant humanism, it examines the transition towards a biologizing era in which “everything is genetical”, as well its ideological justifications. Particularly, the presentation underlines the way in which instrumentalization of bioethics committees and technological assessment programs (at the national, supranational or international levels) favor of the normalization of the human in biological terms. In the process, borders are transformed into multiple public institutional networks arranged as polymorphic, discontinous and complementary configurations, which are created or deconstructed out of necessities and compelling needs for political legitimation.

5. Martine Kaluszynski (socio-historian, PACTE, CNRS, Grenoble)
From anthropometric notebook to biometric passeport: Identification, a State building practice 

Technologies of social control and instruments of identification instruments are governmental techniques that helped the building of the Nation-State. Anthropometry has allowed for the first time to establish scientifically the identity of offenders and to punish recidivists. The combination of a rigorous establishing of the defendants’ descriptions juxtaposed and a rational technique of classification has lead to the instauration of a sophisticated and effective judicial register. These elements shaped the cornerstone of the anthropometric system. The development of this method, its implementation, its results and its consequences have helped the enforcement of law, order and repression, as well as the establishment of a republican technique (and “a policy”) of government based on identity. This general process of rationalization of police techniques in order to identify individuals (Bertillon, fingerprinting, etc.) has faced a profound transformation in France since the last third of the nineteenth century leading to the INES project (Secured National electronic Identity) suggested in 2005 by the French Ministry of the Interior. This intensification of technologies reflects a reorganization of modes of expressions of public authorities. It raises questions about the consequences of its search for a new efficiency and legitimacy. Indeed, this process has brought public authorities to increasingly anchor themselves within society and to rely on technological developments that blur the classical borders between security and freedom, justice and policing, repression and surveillance.

6. Hidefumi Nishiyama (politics and International Studies, University of Warwick)
Bordering bodies in Imperial Japan and beyond

In 1926 Japanese scientists led by Furuhata Tanemoto, a professor of forensic science and later the chief of National Research Institute of Police Science, began to classify racial and ethnic groups by calculating their fingerprints. The Scientific measurement, or what Furuhata calls the ‘fingerprint index,’ established a correlation between fingerprint patterns and racial and ethnic groups who were accordingly categorised into the spectrum of civilisation and the hierarchical order of the empire: from ‘civilised’ and ‘Japanese-type’ identity to ‘primitive’ and ‘dangerous’ one. This paper conducts a historical case study of Japanese scientific research on fingerprints between the 1920s and 1930s in which bodies became space of bordering practices by predicting their dispositions and criminality. Spatialisation of bodies was twofold: on the one hand bodies were spatialised in a sense that physical bodily features became sphere of production of a particular identity; and on the other hand bodies were also territorialised into a geographical location and the spectrum of political powers. By historicising biometric identification, the paper further attempts to throw light on the relationship between identity and identification including in contemporary border controls in which the un/desirability of bodies are continuously calculated in a similar but yet distinct manner.

7. Gabriel Popescu (geographer, Indiana University, South Bend)
Border bodyscapes and precarious life from antiAtlas of Borders

Risk management strategies associated with the quest to securitize transnational mobility have triggered a technological race to embed borders into the human body. The belief is that mobile risks can be estimated from mobile bodies and efficiently eliminated along the way, so that traffic flows are not disrupted at the border. Accordingly, bodies are imagined as spaces to inscribe borders on. This logic of power has adopted a view predominant in natural sciences that sees the body as a material object that can be rendered digitally knowable with the help of technology. Biometric technologies, among others, are used to acquire comprehensive knowledge about every mobile body even before it crosses state borders. Then, these bodily data are used to classify people in terms of good versus bad mobility in order to produce categories that are amenable to risk contingency calculus. In this way, knowledge of the body results in power over the body. This is, at the same time, power over the most intimate and mobile of spaces. A closer examination reveals that such logic of spatial control tends to imagine border automation as panacea for reconciling unfettered mobility and territorial security. Biometric technology is understood as a tool that would allow predicting future threats and threatening behavior. Contrary to claims that digital border technologies simply aid human decision-making, the manner in which they are implemented suggests that border automation aims to assume self decision-making capabilities that diminish human involvement in the act of bordering. In this context, it is important to understand if biometric bordering can reduce uncertainty to make life more secure or if it is creating more uncertainty making life more precarious.

8. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (science politique, University of Victoria, Bristish Columbia)
Borders, Theory and Security: the border, here, there, and everywhere

The 18th and 19th centuries were disciplinary eras where societies implemented a type of power, a set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, and technologies that were anti nomadic. Today’s era is control. This is a time when a type of power, and technique allows the body to become a password in a coded flow, allowing access to mobility and status. In the meantime security which was traditionally conceived as mono-sectoral and focused on the military, is now multi-sectoral. This suggests the importance of thinking clearly about the balance between sectors, types of threats, actors and elements, which together have important implications for security policies. Security policies are more complex, because issues identified as security threats are also more diverse; they are plural and multi-faceted in nature. Border security policies struggle with these new complex dimensions of security. Indeed, this new complexity is reflected in various uneven ways in state border and borderland policy and affects their neighborly and international relations. This increased complexity in security matters also has consequences for definitions of borders and borderlands – it is the border here, there, everywhere. 

9. Joana Moll (new media artist, Barcelone)
Move and get shot: Surveillance through social networks along the US-Mexico Border

The Texas Border and AZ: move and get shot are two net-based artworks which explore the phenomenon of surveillance on the internet carried out by civilians on the border between Mexico and the US. Many of these online platforms appeared during the rise of the social networking service whose structure was adopted as a cheaper and more efficient alternative way to monitor the border. Thus, the recreational activity became a tool for militarizing the civil society. This talk will expose the research process behind the two artworks and will analyze the evolution of some of these net based platforms from its inception to the present.

10. Nick Mai (anthropologist, London Metropolitan University)
Emborder : the biographisation of borders

Because of the increasingly restrictive policies framing global migrations, the granting of asylum and the social protection of vulnerable migrant groups have become new biographical borders between the West and the Rest of the world. Within the humanitarian governance of migration, gender and sexuality have become strategic narrative repertoires through which hierarchies of belonging and barriers to mobility are reinforced. The focus on the sexual dimension to construct and control specific groups of migrants as vulnerable through humanitarian interventions can be defined as ‘sexual humanitarianism’. The Emborders (Embodying Biographical Borders) filmmaking/research project problematizes the effectiveness and scope of sexual humanitarianism by comparing the experiences of two groups of migrants who are addressed as potential ‘target victims’: migrants working in the sex industry and sexual minority migrants. Emborders assembles the narratives of victimhood and emancipation they perform in the context of original research interviews and ethnographic observations.

11. Jean Cristofol (philosophe, Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix en Provence)
Flow, images and borders

Pictures are moments captured, shared, modified in the circulation of information flow. Thus they contribute to form the very substance of our everyday experience, not only as objects that we encounter and convey meaning, but as the changing reality of the environment in which we find ourselves. Hence, the place of images has been modified as well as the relationship between images to places. The main issue at stake is no longer only the separation between the image of the world and the world of images, but that many ways in which the interpenetration of the world and images occurs. This new position of the image is related to the way one can think of the space of information flows. For a long time cyberspace was thought as a second sphere in which one could immerge oneself; a world without borders that was be deployed beyond the geographical space, or in which the forms of separation and closure were of a different nature. It must be noted that what is currently happening is significantly different. Current immersions into cyberspace taking the form of the intrusion or “pervasion”. It is the relationship between image and immersion and pervasion that will be discussed in this talk.

Organisation

Cédric Parizot (IMéRA, IREMAM, CNRS-AMU)
Jean Cristofol (Ecole Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence)

Partners

IMéRA (Aix-Marseille Université), Ecole supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Laboratoire PACTE (Université de Grenoble), Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM, CNRS-AMU), Laboratoire Méditerranéen de Sociologie (LAMES, CNRS-AMU), Aix-Marseille Université, Réseau Français des Instituts d’Etudes Avancées (RFIEA), Région Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur, CNRS

Poster : Myriam Boyer