Video surveillance. MICHAEL PROBST/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.
Borders and infrastructure enable or disable the movement of humans and goods, data and money. Therefore, both sites catalyse the future of human togetherness – either fostering equality or aggravating inequality. Can the decisions about the control of movement, and thus about the future of society – that are often made behind closed doors – become a democratic project? Berliner Gazette and Volksbühne at Rosa Luxemburg Platz have invited activists, researchers, coders and journalists to search for answers at the BG Annual Conference, entitled TACIT FUTURES. It takes place in Berlin from 27 to 29 October, initiating discussions and collaborative processes tackling the democratic control of movement. Warming up for this event, Berliner Gazette’s Krystian Woznicki sat down with researcher Catarina Frois to talk hyper-security, video-surveillance and borders.
Krystian Woznicki: In your work you have been researching video surveillance, which nowadays has become omnipresent in private space and public space alike. A strong focus of most technologies in this sector lies on predicting futures moves: the analysis of (people's) movements (in particular) within a framework of patterns and a cybernetic approach that could be called 'killing the enemy in its future'. Allow us to pose some questions against this background: by which types of video surveillance do you see yourself and us as society most affected? Which types of video surveillance do you see being debated today, and which are largely neglected?
