Art on the Fractured US-Mexico Border

The US-Mexico border is a site where invasive digital technologies are deployed for surveillance. This is the culmination of decades of expanded funding in surveillance infrastructure. Artists and researchers have critically engaged with this border regime by exposing its systemic failures and interrogating the authoritarian ideological frameworks that underpin it. This lecture presents a guidebook with primary research that details the digital border—an unconstitutional dragnet that violates civil liberties and human rights—and the creative practices that challenge it.

Part of the graduate work-in-progress series “New Border Imaginaries in an Age of Security,” convened by Professors Debarati Sanyal (French) and Rhiannon Welch (Italian Studies).

Isa Bratton-Benfield is a PhD student in the Film & Media Department at UC Berkeley whose research documents the design of physical data infrastructures, their genealogies, questions of data sovereignty, and their geopolitical valences.