Inscriptive Intimacies: Atmospheric Media and the Scales of Incarceration

• In Event: Sensing Infrastructure: Perception, Politics, and Media of the US-Mexico Border

Abstract

On July 4th weekend in 2020, In Plain Sight, a spectacular artistic display of messages put together by a collective of 80 artists, typed notes in the sky near incarceration sites, international borders, and immigration courts throughout the United States. With the expressed goal of bringing attention to the state and private industries’ culpability sustaining and profiting from prison and border proliferation, the images were sky-typed using water vapor, each five miles long and over 1,000 feet tall, making them legible for miles. The event’s flight path began along the US-Mexico borderline and worked its way up throughout southern states like Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, ending in New York City. Artists ranging from the queer collective (F)empower MIA to the abolitionist Dread Scott presented statements, at once elegiac and uncompromising. Presenting demands like “#No Wall #No Muro” near ports of entry, “#AbolishPol(ICE)” outside a county jail in Nogales, Arizona, or the invectives expressing survival and struggle: “Estoy aquí: sobreviviré” and “Juntxs Esperamos.”

In this essay, I consider the affective politics of In Plain Sight through its framing of carcerality. This self-described “mediagenic spectacle and poetic act” was meant to exhibit the economic and political entanglement between carceral sites and communities across the US. The event’s abolitionist framework illuminated the reach and intimacy of what sits “in plain sight,” the carceral state. Following scholars who look at the intersections of race and atmosphere like Hsu, Christina Sharpe, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, I argue that In Plain Sight as atmospheric media brings into sharp relief the limitation of reformist strategies grounded in the exposure of atrocity alone. Its aesthetics draw on and depart from visibility as it moves through synesthetic registers that make manifest the medial, informational, and material networks sustaining migrant detention. Functioning in and between the spectacular and quiet, proximate and distant, as well as the legible and illegible, the art installation attunes us to the files, databases, computer terminals, buildings, and roads that, though small in interface, are vast in structure. From the sky to the cloud, In Plain Sight reveals the atmospheric violence that overlaps with and often amplifies the uneven distribution of risk that extends beyond the detention center itself.

Author

• Benjamin Williams, Marshall University