Making Things Secure: Data as Objects of Violence and Things of Beauty

“Let every object under our consideration be imagined to have its inward contents scoop’d out so nicely, as to have nothing of it left but a thin shell […] the imagination will naturally enter into the vacant space within this shell” (William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty).

Contemporary security practice is replete with metaphors of the ‘joining of dots’, the connecting together of otherwise disparate data elements such that a securable whole can be visualized and acted upon. As objects these data articulate a displacement in the representation of that which is to be secured – from credit card or travel ticket to algorithm and screen, an entire world of security is imagined and inferred across the gaps and flight paths, the ‘vacant spaces’ of mobile and lively data objects. As we see in Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’, an objective aesthetic appears to become possible, wherein the whole is graspable through the sum of its perfectly arrayed parts. Thus, the designers of border control software systems seek out a visualization that is a thing of beauty, a whole picture produced by the arraying of multiple data sources. And yet these data themselves have a life that is never fully appreciable or governable via the security technique, a ‘vital materiality’ as it is for Jane Bennett (2010). Bringing Bennett’s vibrant matter into conversation with Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston’s lively histories of scientific objects, this paper examines data as security objects that live and act among other objects, prosaic and yet potentially violent.