Institutionalized suspicion toward border-crossing bodies is increasingly systematized by the security models of complete situational awareness. This hyper-surveillant regime relies on the seamless interoperation of inspection technologies and architectural design to manage, contain, and exclude those bodies at borders. This paper focuses on airports as one such space of mistrust and asks: how do surveillance technologies and architectural design converge in the practices of regulating borders? We respond by examining the architecture of Amsterdam Schiphol Airport as a ‘suspicious infrastructure’ (Simon Noori 2022) that continuously adapts itself to the state-of-the-art technologies which sense, inspect and organize mistrusted, human and more-than-human bodies en route. [...]

Nineteenth-century cartographic imagination saw dragons, sea serpents, ‘men without heads with their faces in their chests’ and many other intimidating beasts of the lands unknown, terre incognite, abandon their corners of the Earth—permanently.² Popularized by the phrase ‘here be dragons’, the mapmakers’ exotic creatures occupied uncharted territories for centuries until the colonial expansion took hold, ousting the ambiguities and risks associated with venturing unknown lands. Today, the accuracy and detail of digital Earth Engines allow for little surface for such cartographic fiction to take hold, feeding a longstanding rhetoric of omniscience through the seamless ‘Google Earth’ interface. Yet, as this paper argues, the unknown, the unseen and the liminal continue to thrive within and across the infrastructures of environmental monitoring, without necessarily disturbing the cartographic surface. Resorting to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s invocation of ‘planetarity’ alongside the ‘globe’, this paper asks: What remains unseen in the regime of ubiquitous surveillance? A media-material reading is engaged for responding to this question on the two operational levels of remote imaging: data gathering and data processing. The resulting framework of spectral and statistical (in)visibilities are further discussed in relation to the production of spatial knowledge.

After 9/11, the regulation of global mobility witnessed substantial changes. Suspicion of movement intensified and the need to detect, classify, and eventually stop any threat from outside became the priority of state authorities. As a consequence, national and international airports progressively assumed the role of biopolitical infrastructures. In the restless search for the "anomalous" and "irregular", not only luggage and possessions are subject to intense scrutiny; identities, histories, and finances are also inspected. By implementing sophisticated surveillance technologies, the airports reproduce several homeland security strategies, such as the control of cross-border movements and migration management. From this perspective, airport surveillance practices, as border structures, dynamically redefine and construct the relation between bodies in motion and material boundaries.

Extraction displaces materials and reorganises habitats by accumulating resources – a process that renders populations and natural reserves as extractable data to be mobilised in systems of metabolic exchange. In contemporary practice, collecting, sorting, and processing this data require a complex interoperability between sensors, computing platforms, and databases before they are made into earth observation images. Following the scholarly research on the instrumentality of aerial survey in histories of extractive colonialism, this essay sheds light on the extractive capacity of remote sensing technologies in contemporary mining industries. Engaging with the media infrastructures of resource exploration, the inquiry revisits Heidi Scott’s theory of ‘colonialism’s vertical third dimension’ and extends it from the physical to the sensory, numerical, and temporal domains of extractivism. After Sean Cubitt’s classification of mediated earth observation, the three geomedia, the discussion is organised in three parts: electromagnetic sensing, numerical translations, and financial futures. A media-archaeological analysis of earth observation systems brings forth the extractive codes of the remote view by revealing its selective, vectoral, and speculative capacities in tapping the earth and ordering its resources into materials of exchange.