“Borders begin as fictions. They are performed. They are lines drawn in the sand, spaces that bend and break and make exceptions for certain kinds of bodies.”
“But borders are made real by the policies built around them. The fact that borders are performed does not make them any less real. The border is quite literally what gives the nation its shape.”
“One way the border is performed — particularly the southern border of the United States — can be understood through the lens of data collection.”
“In the border region, along the Rio Grande and westward through the desert Southwest, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) deploys radar blimps, drones, fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, seismic sensors, ground radar, face recognition software, license-plate readers, and high-definition infrared video cameras. Increasingly, they all feed data back into something called “The Big Pipe.””
“In his 2014 essay “Geographies of Photography,” Paglen sketched out the role of seeing machines in creating relational geographies capable of collapsing space and time.”
“Seeing machines create noncontiguous spatial and temporal geometries. They collapse the near into the distant, and the present into the past and future. To illustrate these “relative” geographies of seeing machines, I’ll use the example of a Reaper drone. What exactly is a Reaper drone? In essence, it’s a camera attached to a remote-controlled airplane. Sometimes it carries missiles. What’s particular about a Reaper drone (and other drones in its larger family, including the Predator and the Sentinel) is that airplane, pilot, navigator, analysts, and commander don’t have to be in the same place. The aircraft might be flying a combat mission in Yemen by a pilot based in Nevada, overseen by a manager in Virginia, and supported by intelligence officers in Tampa (geographer Derek Gregory has written about what he calls “Drone Geographies.”) The drone creates its own “relative” geographies, folding several noncontiguous spaces around the globe into a single, distributed, “battlefield.” The folding of space-time that the Reaper drone system enables is a contemporary version of what Marx famously called the “annihilation of space with time,” i.e. the ability to capitalize on the speed of new transportation and communications technologies to bring disparate spaces “closer” together, relatively speaking. Photography has been a part of this space-time annihilation from the start.
Although seeing machines have played a part in the “annihilation of space with time” since the 19th century origins of the phrase, they are increasingly playing a role in creating new relative temporal geographies, perhaps something akin to an “annihilation of time with space.” … There’s every reason to suspect that if the 19th Century saw the annihilation of space with communication and transport technologies, then the 21st Century may see a similarly dramatic reconfiguration of time through persistent monitoring, storage, and analytic technologies that can “reach into the past” in unprecedented ways.”
“The southern border is a space that has been almost entirely reduced to metaphor. It is not even a geography. Part of my intention with this film is to insist on that geography.”
“By focusing on the physical landscape, I hope viewers might gain a sense of the enormity of it all, and perhaps imagine what it would mean to be a political subject of that terrain.”