Inquiry

Ubiquitous surveillance and movement tracking technologies mobilized by corporations and governments continue to criminalize, pathologize, and meticulously document certain people more than others. Knowing that these methods are most punitive and invasive for those movements who are already most scrutinized, whose freedoms already most violated—how can we imagine ways to confront, disarm, and thwart them? How can we resist the relentless drive to commodify gesture (as through patented movements, pattern detection, or algorithmic surveillance)? What does it mean to visualize conditions of incarceration at a bodily scale? How can the conditions, faults, and failures built into the systems used to track our movements be undone via creative practice, and modes of sousveillance and counter-surveillance? Performative strategies become valuable tools for articulating embodied knowledge and enabling sensory inquiry—they offer means to think through, testify about, and respond to difficult knowledges.