<div dir="ltr">
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">First, apologies for my terribly delayed response, but I have been reading contributions by Alex, Paul, and Jennifer with great interest! Byron, thanks very much for the invitation to participate here.</span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0);min-height:12px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">To briefly return to Paul’s initial post, I was so struck by the image of the bikini-clad teenager, unaware that she was traversing an international border (and certainly of her own privileged position that allowed her to do so unchecked). It reminded me in a strange way of Green Borders (1993) by Christian Philip Müller, who dressed as a hiker and illegally crossed, on foot, eight natural borders between Austria and its neighboring nation states. Müller took notes on which disguise was most advantageous in terms of avoiding detection at each crossing, presumably information to be used by others attempting to cross unnoticed on foot. But Müller could have dispensed with the nine specific disguises, simply acknowledging that the guise of a white European man could do wonders for rendering a body safely (in)visible. In spite of the artist’s intentions, I wonder whether this work simply flaunted presentation privilege as opposed to doing anything to undermine established mechanisms of power.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0);min-height:12px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">I bring this up not to denigrate the work of one artist, but, returning to Byron’s prompt, to consider the role artists increasingly play in revealing and combating the spread of misinformation intended to destabilize democratic institutions. Müller’s 1993 work strikes me as coming out of a moment when it was enough to simply highlight the ways in which individual bodies are subject to exercise of state power when attempting to cross geopolitical borders. While far right, anti-immigration sentiments are nothing new in Austria, I wonder how this work would read now. Indeed Alex as you point out, the concept of “carrying capacity,” i.e. the population level sustainable by a demarcated environment, has been wrenched from ecological discourse and and co-opted to maintain population homogeneity since the 1970s. But with the rise of power/influence of the FPO in Austria and other nationalist parties like it throughout Europe, not to mention the current American administration, one feels as though we’ve crossed a threshold into unprecedented territory.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>I find that I increasingly interested in the way that artists don’t simply reveal systemic power structures that oppress vulnerable populations, but stage interventions to provide tools for systemic subversion. When Jennifer asks how the public is to maintain oversight, I immediately think of works by Trevor Paglen and Laura Poitras (most well known is their contribution to the Citizenfour documentary on Snowden), whose practice both reveals and perhaps takes steps towards dismantling what Paglen has called “the geography and aesthetics of the American surveillance state.”<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p>
<p class="gmail-p2" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0);min-height:12px"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"></span><br></p>
<p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none">On a spectrum, there’s much distance to travel between Müller hiking across borders largely unmolested by authorities, and Paglen/Poitras working with a whistle blower. Paul and Alex, I’m curious to hear more about your respective practices and how you see the role of the artist changing in this current fraught moment (or perhaps it’s not changing at all?). To place an ethical imperative on art seems like an undue burden, but as Byron has pointed out, it does seem to be the artists rather than the technocrats who are willing to enact radical measures against authoritarian overtures in our political landscape.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"><br></span></span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space">Best,</span></span></p><p class="gmail-p1" style="margin:0px;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-stretch:normal;line-height:normal;font-family:"Helvetica Neue";color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span class="gmail-s1" style="font-kerning:none"><span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space" style="">Paula </span></span></p></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">On Sat, Sep 22, 2018 at 11:51 AM Gradecki, Jennifer <<a href="mailto:j.gradecki@northeastern.edu">j.gradecki@northeastern.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
<br>
Borders are simultaneously demarcated, and controlled, in physical and virtual space. When we attempt to cross borders, data and information that has been collected about us becomes part of the assessment process. Individuals are profiled in various ways—their country of origin, the social media networks they belong to, GIS data from their cellphone, their research interests, suspicious bodily movements as they wait in line for security—all of this captured data, and more, becomes part of our data body that shadows us as we travel.<br>
<br>
Data are central to the work of intelligence agencies and border patrol agents. The massive scale of surveillance in both virtual and physical space produces enormous amounts of data and information that agents feel they need to collect, share, and process. Leaked documents and ethnographic reports show that intelligence agents are afraid that they may not be sharing enough information with one another, and yet they simultaneously feel that they are drowning in too much information, and struggling to make meaning out of noise. This “collect it all” and “share it all” approach has resulted in the accumulation of more information than can be processed by human agents, leading to the perception of a need for automated processing, or what are sometimes referred to as “next generation information access” (NGIA) systems, to algorithmically process the massive troves of data they have collected, with the belief that software will find patterns that human analysts cannot perceive. This fear of not collecting or sharing enough data emerged following the intelligence failures of 9/11.<br>
<br>
Data are understood by intelligence agents to be raw facts and meaning is thought to be mechanically and objectively found by the analyst or algorithm. While these assumptions reflect an empiricist epistemology, I have found that intelligence analysts generally find it hard to articulate an epistemological methodology of their practice, even while they disavow deduction and intuition, which are central to their practice. This may leave agents susceptible to dominant epistemological shifts and arguments coming from other fields, like data science and Artificial Intelligence (AI), that bring their own sets of assumptions as they promise to provide technological solutions to ease the difficulties of mass surveillance. Companies like IBM promote their black boxed “smart algorithms” to analysts who do not understand how these technologies work, even while they rely on these technologies to make judgments.<br>
<br>
It is with all of this in mind that I turn to a specific instance of automated judgment and border surveillance. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, along with former executives from the CIA-funded tech company Palantir are currently in the process of developing Virtual Reality that is augmented by Artificial Intelligence to automate judgments in the surveillance of the border between the US and Mexico. Luckey’s defense tech company, Anduril, has pitched this cybernetic surveillance agencement to DHS as the technological version of Trump’s border wall. According to Luckey, the technology desired by the DOD can be described as “Call of Duty goggles” where “you put on the glasses, and the headset display tells you where the good guys are, where the bad guys are, where your air support is, where you’re going, where you were.” Far beyond a cybernetic aid for improving the perception of movement, the ideal version of this technology would employ Artificial Intelligence to automate judgments at the border, to help determine the “bad guys”. As proprietary technology, it is not clear what kind of data or algorithms will be used to determine who is supposedly good or bad. This is yet another black boxed smart algorithm being sold as a technological solution to the problems produced by the massive scale of surveillance that US agencies are attempting to undertake.<br>
<br>
There are several assumptions with this virtual (not to mention gamified) border security: that data can provide evidence of a threat to national security, that judgments at the border can and should be automated, and especially, that someone who risks their life to cross the border must be a threat. Trump’s Great Wall is founded on both xenophobia and ignorance about the broader conditions that prompt people to risk their lives to cross the border. The DHS and DOD appear to be taken in by the data science rhetoric used by companies like Anduril. Border agents should not use black boxed “smart algorithms” to automate judgments, especially judgments that contain this many assumptions. This leaves me with one looming question: how can we, the public, have meaningful oversight over proprietary public-private technological solutions to border surveillance?<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
empyre forum<br>
<a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br>
<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a></blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr">Paula Burleigh, PhD<div>Allegheny College<br><div>Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History </div><div>Director, Bowman~Penelec~Megahan Gallery</div><div>E: <a href="mailto:pburleigh@allegheny.edu" target="_blank">pburleigh@allegheny.edu</a></div><div>P: 814-332-3383</div><div>Doane Hall of Art, A206 </div></div></div></div></div></div>