Fifteenth #4: On borders

Technologies of borders past, present, and future

From lantern laws of eighteenth-century New York to AI-powered sentiment analysis, dialect recognition and computer vision — how the logic of borders surveils the racialised Other while seeking to look beneath our skin

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Ring of Steel: Fleet Street (2010) a collaborative project to make visible the “function, nature and effect” of the surveillance apparatus encircling the City of London, by photographer Henrietta Williams and map maker George Gingell

Borders are a technology concerned with constraining where and when people can move.

Our understanding of borders and who they target has been skewed since the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, we perceive borders as a technology directed towards people who originate beyond a nation-state. However, when we examine the histories of bordering, its technologies are more often aimed at restricting the freedom of movement within a nation-state.

So, who were the targets of early bordering technologies? How were they identified and captured in data? How do these histories and logics contribute to the bordering technologies operating today?