Diffracting the digital border: Migration, aesthetics and techno-resistance

The ongoing migration crisis has led to a rapid development of the border industry, allowing actors like FRONTEX (the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) to implement risk-management models alongside humanitarian aid, using a wide range of digital technologies aimed at the prevention and prediction of people’s mobility. The aim of the study is to investigate the transdisciplinary topic of migration in connection to the emergence of such digital border. This border, in fact, is not simply an upgrade to older ones but has its own representational specificity. I suggest that the technoscientific apparatuses making up the digital border are shaped by a compression of space into a single time rooted in European colonialism, and in their turn, repurpose historical patterns that continue a series of long-dated extractive operations. In this view, it is crucial to acknowledge the relevance of the non-human next to the human, since anthropocentrism tends to conceal the agency of digital objects operationalising our technoscientific infrastructures. Such perspective neglects the potential of algorithms and computation for otherworlding, or the creation of alternative worlds. Therefore, I contend that the possibility of otherworlding builds on a speculative gaze that shares a number of qualities with both science-fiction (SF) and anthropology. In my work I borrow the trope of teleportation to reveal the multiple temporalities that lie within the apparently linear and coherent processes materialising logics of inclusion/ exclusion in present-day border management. Teleportation is employed to explore the boundaries that enable certain ethics of difference as well as the conditions this offers for social justice. The dimension of aesthetics is crucial in this regard. Aesthetics in fact encompasses computation and its by-products, introducing an entire regime of experience reaching beyond the human, as algorithms themselves transform the logic of the sensible. Focusing on agencies operating outside the conceptual framework of representation, aesthetics blurs the distinction between the object and the apparatus, and sets the stage for a series of reconfigurations that allow for a hypothetical appropriation of borders. Critically approaching the digital border becomes also a methodological issue. Building on debates within humanities and social sciences, I employ art-based research (ABR) next to traditional academic writing. To counter the colonial use of time via technoscience, I apply a diffractive lens that calls into play sound, an intrinsically temporal phenomenon. Through the affordances of sound, I propose an attunement to matter and discourse that entangles a theoretical stance and a practice aimed at reworking the perception of time itself. In analogy with digital and technoscientific apparatuses, sounds should be seen as results of a series of superimpositions, which enjoy an ambigous relation to temporality and suggest an ethical attunement to borders- as well as opportunities for techno-resistance.