(self-portrait), a survey of the virtual border
In the summer of 2024 I began working on a photographic survey of the U.S.’s ongoing project to establish a ‘virtual border.’ This project comprises autonomous surveillance towers which are placed roughly two miles apart along the entirety of the U.S./Mexico border. This infrastructure is made through contracting with private tech companies like Anduril Industries, who have leveraged their previous work in the virtual reality and video game spheres into defense and weapons oriented initiatives. These sentry towers, among other surveillance embodiments, are part of a growing web of sensors which are used to reproduce the borderland into an expanded and more easily trackable virtual space.
The project is built around ongoing attempts to retrieve materials from the state archive of virtual border surveillance. The work begins by locating and traveling to individual towers and making photographic works within the operable view (~ 2 miles) of the tower. These photographic works are made using a large format film camera and contact printed in the darkroom. By linking the outmoded form of the analog view camera to the hyper-contemporary form of the autonomous surveillance tower I am suggesting a complex historical bind between historic photographic technology and its afterlives in ongoing construction of the nation-state
By photographing within the immediate vicinity of the surveillance tower, I make myself present and known during the duration of the encounter. Subsequently, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is submitted in order to retrieve all media obtained of myself by the virtual border system throughout the encounter, resulting in sequences of unique correspondences between myself and CBP in attempts to retrieve this archive of surveillance media. These correspondences become representations of the virtual border in their own right, revealing and recording the strategies of denial and redaction that these agencies employ in order to safeguard its imagery and uphold its power. These correspondences are reproduced as text-transfer darkroom prints. In the end a series of photographic works are produced which act as both a traditional photographic survey of the infrastructure and geography of the ‘virtual border’ alongside a juridical, and bureaucratic performance of the legal system which maintains its discretionary order.
