Digital media are marked by particular ambivalences towards bordering and the un/making of all kinds of boundaries. To function as seamlessly as possible, such media depend on the interoperability of various hardware and software components, devices and apps as well as on the expectations and practices of those who shape and operate them. Today’s sensor societies’ (cf. Andrejevic and Burdon 2015) promise of ‘seamless interoperability’ drives the growing implementation of so-called ‘smart’, networked computational infrastructures in urban and rural environments, for the governance of public spaces and to establish and uphold border regimes, in order to sense, capture and control human and non-human entities. Such ‘smart’ computational infrastructures thrive on and bring about increasingly unbounded – or “frameless” (Andrejevic 2018) – modes of data collection. 

Aspirations to ever more seamless data collection often go hand in hand with increasing restrictions for many to access the respective monitored environments. Sensor media-based and data-intensive environmental and individual capture, like static and mobile tracing and tracking are not only based on practices of differentiation, categorization, and calculation (cf. Friedrich 2022). They also inscribe themselves in the enforcement of border policies and ultimately in the understanding of borders themselves, in a process that Louise Amoore (2021) has called “deep bordering”. That is to say, sensor media and the wider data infrastructures they are embedded in (re)produce and reconfigure not only digital but also physical spaces and their more or less contingent boundaries, on the technical-infrastructural, societal and geopolitical level.

The ongoing effort to un/make boundaries within networked sensor media – be it in the name of efficiency, visionary design ideals, or economic competition – finds its counterpart in the un/making of boundaries through such media.  Since Mark Weiser’s (1999) famous invocation of the ideal of seamless availability of information across various devices and applications in the context of ubiquitous computing, there have been ongoing debates especially in the field of human-computer interaction about the conditions of possibility and value of “seamfulness” and “seamful design” (e.g. Chalmers 2003; Inman and Ribes 2019; Vertesi 2014). ‘Seams’ are envisioned to have the productive capacity of surfacing, emphasizing, and mobilising sites of friction and possible disconnects.

This conference aims at bringing three sites where boundaries are made, un- and re-made into a fruitful dialogue, inquiring into (deep) bordering as cooperative practice and the (re)configuration of seamlessness as an ongoing achievement:

1. In the southern EU borderlands, asymmetric seamless data collection translates into violent regimes of migration control, into practices of sensing and counter-sensing those regimes, and into attempts to cross material and digital borders. 
2. On ‘smart’ farms, the virtualisation of pasture fencing creates zones in which containment or exclusion is negotiated between more-than-human actors, that is, between livestock and the various devices used for tracking, monitoring and, ultimately, restricting their movement via operant conditioning. 
3. In urban spaces, “smart city” discourses and their innovation agenda’s promise to optimise the management of public spaces through platform technologies and networked digital devices offering “seamless” interaction and interoperability, while everyday practices of governing and navigating urban areas reveal their socio-technical “seams” opening up opportunities for situational forms of critical engagement. 

The conference welcomes contributions that engage with these sites, as well as contributions that offer a theoretical meta-perspective on seams, borders, frames and their respective absences.

References

Amoore, L. (2021). The Deep Border. Political Geography, 109, 102547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102547
Andrejevic, M. B. (2018). “Framelessness”, or the cultural logic of big data. In M. Daubs & V. Manzerolle (Eds.), Mobile and Ubiquitous Media: Critical and International Perspectives (pp. 251–267). Peter Lang.
Andrejevic, M., & Burdon, M. (2015). Defining the Sensor Society. Television & New Media, 16(1), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476414541552
Chalmers, M., MacColl, I., & Bell, M. (2003). Seamful design: Showing the seams in wearable computing. 2003 IEE Eurowearable, 11–16. https://doi.org/10.1049/ic:20030140
Friedrich, K. (2022). Tracken. In H. Christians, M. Bickenbach, & N. Wegmann (Eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch des Mediengebrauchs: Band 3. Böhlau Verlag. https://doi.org/10.7788/9783412514327
Inman, S., & Ribes, D. (2019). “Beautiful Seams”: Strategic Revelations and Concealments. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300508
Vertesi, J. (2014). Seamful Spaces: Heterogeneous Infrastructures in Interaction. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 39(2), 264–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243913516012
Weiser, M. (1999). The computer for the 21st century. SIGMOBILE Mob. Comput. Commun. Rev., 3(3), 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/329124.329126