Digital Hunters

Techno-Territories in the Age of Computational Surveillance

Abstract

As the infrastructure of the internet continues to expand, networked computational surveillance becomes an essential practice of territorial and biopolitical control. The feedback loop between information technologies and global structures of power creates new territorial and biopolitical regimes that sanction the mobility of people and information across Earth. These new ‘techno-territories’ lead to the emergence of new agents of power, who weave virtual and material worlds together in order to exercise control over these new spaces and the bodies that flow through them. This article discusses the emergence of ‘digital hunters’ as both subjects and objects of power through a discursive analysis of AZ: move and get shot (2011-2014) and The Virtual Watchers (2016), two artworks by Joana Moll based on research into crowdsourced surveillance systems at the US/Mexico border. Through a discussion of these projects I trace the emergence of digital hunting as a new practice of territorial control through networked images, as citizens are militarized through participatory architectures of surveillance and social media.