Surveillance Technologies in Performance and Migration

This book reflects on the violent impact of digital border systems and surveillance practices that dehumanises migrating bodies, drawing parallels between these and similar harmful acts of identity marking in relation to performance and migration.It examines a range of movement-centred contemporary performance practice, including the author’s collaborative practice-based explorations, which disrupt and subvert surveillance technologies, carried out along the Kent coast and UK border.This book draws from three areas: Aneta Stojnic’s ‘body-as-data’ phenomenon, technology's effects on border control, and digital technology’s relationship to performance. It investigates the ways in which performance practice can create an opportunity for bodies transcribed into data at digital border zones to be removed from the machinic identity placed upon them to create a counter-narrative which is more human and multifaceted. Offering the original concept of ‘choreographing evidence’, which employs choreographic practices as a framework through which to analyse Practice as Research, the book applies PaR methods to performance works created with artist and refugee Tom Tegento: Uninvited (2021) and Contagion (2021). This work disrupts surveillance technologies and their violence towards bodies at borders as well as using them in alternative ways within performance practice. It considers how choreography which utilises both overt optical tracking technologies and GPS methods embedded in smart devices can enable othered bodies to re-draw borders, re-claim narratives and re-situate the self.Alongside this PaR work, the book analyses contemporary performance which uses the body and/or technology to explore narratives of migration, presenting a range of issues they may fall into, such as aestheticizing, absenting or speaking for migrating bodies, and offering examples of UK and European works which critique the way migrating bodies are represented within performance. Works discussed include: Flight Pattern (2019), A Place to Sit (2021), The Walk (Little Amal) (2021) and Now is the Time to Say Nothing (2019), among others. The insights gained through this PaR intervention offer a richer understanding of the power dynamics at digital borders, how they function, how they can be resisted and how they are felt and lived.