NAVIGATING SCREENS

ABSTRACT

This essay aims to reflect on some of the ways in which security surveillance technology has become politicised through race and gender biases, the product of a historical process known as cis-coloniality. This analysis aims to demonstrate, with some urgency, that this type of technology is not neutral and in fact reinforces transgendered racism, under the auspices of "efficiency and security". Rather than providing alternatives for the democratisation of intelligent connected cities, it actually operates as a device for classifying risk, harvesting data and alienating black, poor and transsexual bodies, by widening and reframing the gap between bodies and territories. Technopolitics validate both proof of life and automate experience. They determine gender and circumscribe death movements in cities with hyper-surveillance, thus turning collective life into an image-based ritual, through which the militarisation of urban space and the dynamic of contemporary capitalism itself are amplified.