The Virtuality of Territorial Borders

Abstract

If architecture is politics, then the rise of data-driven computing systems will transform the course, if not the conditions of possibility for the political. Provoked by the work of artists Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir, this contribution explores the connections between terror and safety, borders and jurisdictions, and those between individual and collective subjects. I argue that we are moving into a world constituted by networked, mobile and polymorphous borders that will require hard work to sustain our capability to reconfigure multitudes as collective subjects, offering protection against untenable uncertainty in the face of a volatile jurisdictional instability.

Keywords: jurisdiction, territory, terror, exterritory, extraterritorial, cyberspace, virtual, actual, the figure of the migrant, the political, representation, mare liberum, cyberspace liberum, Exterritory art project