Adding volume and technological flesh to the Mediterranean border zone

This chapter uses the Space-Eye project as a gateway to engage with currently developing aerial, satellite, and maritime surveillance infrastructures in the Mediterranean border zone. Ten years after the so-called “Mediterranean migration crisis”, how are the policies and discourses responding to this crisis currently translated into specific surveillance infrastructures used by the European Border and Coast Agency (Frontex) as part of the digital infrastructure of the EU’s external border surveillance information exchange framework (EUROSUR)? This paper is based on ethnographic research with the Regensburg-based NGO Space-Eye and their goal to combine artificial intelligence and satellite images to support civil search and rescue missions. By utilising my insights gained from a collaborative ethnographic engagement with Space-Eye’s practicalities of “doing” satellite surveillance “for the good”, my aim is to add “volume and technological flesh” to the turbulent materialities of the Mediterranean border zone as three-/four-dimensional space rather than two-dimensional area. I aim to show how border externalisation is made on top of technological objects and the algorithms that operate them and ultimately re-shape the space of the Mediterranean for actors such as civil SAR missions.