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Paper Short Abstract:

Using a para-ethnographic approach to the work of the Regensburg-based NGO Space-Eye and its associates, I want to use their socio-technological practices as a gateway to currently developing aerial, satellite, and maritime surveillance infrastructures in the Mediterranean border zone.

Paper Abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic research with the Regensburg-based NGO Space-Eye and its associates. Space-Eye´s goal is to combine artificial intelligence and satellite images to support civil sea-rescue missions. I use the Space-Eye project as a gateway to engage with currently developing aerial, satellite, and maritime surveillance infrastructures in the Mediterranean border zone of the ‘other side’, namely Frontex´s Aerial Surveillance Services (FASS) as part of the digital infrastructure of the EU’s external border surveillance information exchange framework (EUROSUR). By utilizing both a technographic and volumetric approach, my aim is to add ‘volume and technological flesh’ to the “turbulent materialities” of the Mediterranean border zone.

I want to exemplify Frontex´s attempts to ‘secure the volume’ in air, space, and in-between the two by means of three aerial/satellite surveillance technologies: the ‘Heron 1’ drone, the ‘European Data Relay Satellite System’ (EDRS) and ‘High Altitude Pseudo-Satellites’ (HAPS). I want to show how ‘sovereignty and geopolitical power are made on top of technological objects and the algorithms that operate them’.

In a second step, I want to show how technologies such as UAVs, the EDRS, or HAPS as part of the digital infrastructure of EUROSUR are entangled with legal frameworks and imaginations of the Mediterranean on sea level. I want to exemplify the entanglement of surveillance tools on sea, air, space, and digital level with the Libyan SAR-zone, where a ‘legal fiction’ gained material life and ultimately reshaped the space of the Mediterranean for actors such as civil SAR missions.