Breathing (In)Security? Intervening and Making Sensations from the Air in Santiago of Chile

• In Event: Sensing Security: Sensing and the Making of Transnational Security Infrastructures - I

Abstract

Despite the low homicide and victimization rates, a sense of fear persists among Chileans. This feeling has been installed in Las Condes, one of the highest income municipalities in the country. Inspired by the techno-imaginary of Smart Cities, the Municipality has been introducing a series of "innovative" and "dynamic" surveillance technologies to manage and secure urban spaces and face the so-called "war against crime". These have included the deployment of a surveillance aerostat balloons, algorithmic facial recognition system, and more recently, the use of highly sophisticated drones equipped to deliver "personalized warnings". In particular, these drones would give to the municipality a new vertical vision and a way to make presence from the air that would intervene the citizens' insecurity sensation. However, various neighbours and citizen organizations have criticized the profound over-surveillance and violation of rights that would involve, opening relevant disputes about these security devices. In this contribution, we describe the material and discursive operations deployed by the municipality to detach drones from their military origins and invoke them as a “bottom-up” and effective "solution" to identify threats and inhibit crimes. We argue that the municipality seeks to articulate a regime of surveillance based on the management of citizen sensations by hearing or seeing the drones in the air. In other words, we will reflect on how these technologies open an affective mode of governance and concretization (Gabrys, 2016) over the air, conditioning atmospheres or micro-climates where you would feel (un)expected sensations -like more security, disgust or indifference.

Authors

• Matías Valderrama

• Martin Tironi