Portfolio: Blind River

I had no idea when I first moved from Chicago to Arizona for grad school in 2017 that I would end up making a project about border surveillance and artificial intelligence. My interest had always been in land use and preservation. I was researching mining claims on federal and private lands near the border and kept coming across news articles and reports detailing their impact on jaguar habitat. First, I was shocked to learn there were jaguars in southern Arizona. Second, I found it fascinating this solitary and enigmatic animal few had ever seen was generating such a passionate response from the public.

I reached out to the researchers who, with a large team of citizen scientists, had installed hundreds of remote sensing cameras in a half-dozen mountain ranges along the border to track wildlife migration patterns. The similarities between their research program and the U.S. Border Patrol’s surveillance program in the region are striking. I realized I was more interested in making work about how we