“The enduring image, though, is not what lives in the gallery but the untouchable images of his and others’ lives operationalized within this hyper-surveillance system’s consciousness...The interplay between the request of his image and the portrait of a machine that sees back acts as an obsidian mirror, with the image collected by the machine never amounting to a photographic depiction but rather fugitive and residing in the untouchable symbol of bottomless reflection. What the work demands is a recognition of data capture as it restages the endlessness of American bureaucracy into an archive.”

-Cielo Saucedo “Vision:Noise” from The Avery Review no.75

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 technologies 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 isbuilt 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 darkroom composites 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 order.