In light of recent surveillance developments — social media breaches, smart city ventures, and workplace monitoring — we need to pay more attention to and analyse the logics and practices that underpin, enable, and accelerate big data surveillance. As these interoperable systems map and monitor the movements and behaviours of populations, they cast long data shadows and draw inaccurate data portraits. The flaws of these systems remain points of academic discussion, but as these portraits are propelled forward in space and time perpetuating existing inequalities, more public input is needed on these futures and their implications for people and places. As part of an international multiphase project on Big Data Surveillance, in 2018- 2019 the Surveillance Studies Centre, led by sava saheli singh, produced three short films speculating surveillance futures and the effects of deeply embedded and connected surveillant systems on our everyday lives. Intended as public education tools to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy in the digital age how these manifest in the physical and emotional spaces around us, each film focuses on a different aspect of big data surveillance and the tensions that arise when the human is interpreted by the machine. BLAXITES follows the story of a young woman whose celebratory social media post affects her access to vital medication. Her attempts to circumvent a system that is tracking her life, lead to even more dire consequences. In FRAMES, a smart city tracks and analyzes a woman walking through the city. Things she does are interpreted and logged by the city system, but are they drawing an accurate picture of the woman? In A MODEL EMPLOYEE, an aspiring DJ has to wear a tracking wristband to keep her day job at a local restaurant. To her annoyance, it tracks her life during and outside of work, even using location-based surveillance to nudge her. She figures out a way to fool the system, but a new device upgrade means trouble. The films raise issues in our understandings of trust and surveilled relations, while making visible the underlying systems that map and manipulate us.

In light of recent surveillance developments — social media breaches, smart city ventures, and workplace monitoring — we need to pay more attention to and analyse the logics and practices that underpin, enable, and accelerate big data surveillance. As these interoperable systems map and monitor the movements and behaviours of populations, they cast long data shadows and draw inaccurate data portraits. The flaws of these systems remain points of academic discussion, but as these portraits are propelled forward in space and time perpetuating existing inequalities, more public input is needed on these futures and their implications for people and places. As part of an international multiphase project on Big Data Surveillance, in 2018- 2019 the Surveillance Studies Centre, led by sava saheli singh, produced three short films speculating surveillance futures and the effects of deeply embedded and connected surveillant systems on our everyday lives. Intended as public education tools to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy in the digital age how these manifest in the physical and emotional spaces around us, each film focuses on a different aspect of big data surveillance and the tensions that arise when the human is interpreted by the machine. BLAXITES follows the story of a young woman whose celebratory social media post affects her access to vital medication. Her attempts to circumvent a system that is tracking her life, lead to even more dire consequences. In FRAMES, a smart city tracks and analyzes a woman walking through the city. Things she does are interpreted and logged by the city system, but are they drawing an accurate picture of the woman? In A MODEL EMPLOYEE, an aspiring DJ has to wear a tracking wristband to keep her day job at a local restaurant. To her annoyance, it tracks her life during and outside of work, even using location-based surveillance to nudge her. She figures out a way to fool the system, but a new device upgrade means trouble. The films raise issues in our understandings of trust and surveilled relations, while making visible the underlying systems that map and manipulate us.

In light of recent surveillance developments — social media breaches, smart city ventures, and workplace monitoring — we need to pay more attention to and analyse the logics and practices that underpin, enable, and accelerate big data surveillance. As these interoperable systems map and monitor the movements and behaviours of populations, they cast long data shadows and draw inaccurate data portraits. The flaws of these systems remain points of academic discussion, but as these portraits are propelled forward in space and time perpetuating existing inequalities, more public input is needed on these futures and their implications for people and places. As part of an international multiphase project on Big Data Surveillance, in 2018- 2019 the Surveillance Studies Centre, led by sava saheli singh, produced three short films speculating surveillance futures and the effects of deeply embedded and connected surveillant systems on our everyday lives. Intended as public education tools to spark discussion and extend understandings of surveillance, trust, and privacy in the digital age how these manifest in the physical and emotional spaces around us, each film focuses on a different aspect of big data surveillance and the tensions that arise when the human is interpreted by the machine. BLAXITES follows the story of a young woman whose celebratory social media post affects her access to vital medication. Her attempts to circumvent a system that is tracking her life, lead to even more dire consequences. In FRAMES, a smart city tracks and analyzes a woman walking through the city. Things she does are interpreted and logged by the city system, but are they drawing an accurate picture of the woman? In A MODEL EMPLOYEE, an aspiring DJ has to wear a tracking wristband to keep her day job at a local restaurant. To her annoyance, it tracks her life during and outside of work, even using location-based surveillance to nudge her. She figures out a way to fool the system, but a new device upgrade means trouble. The films raise issues in our understandings of trust and surveilled relations, while making visible the underlying systems that map and manipulate us.

Northern communities in the Canadian provinces are often at a high risk of food insecurity even more so than areas in the high Arctic because of inaccessibility and a lack of subsidies. In the spring of 2015, Meechim Farms was launched and under the glow of the northern lights two shipping containers full of farm equipment were sent via ice roads to this remote region of northern Manitoba. The Meechim Project follows the story of Garden Hill First Nation - in northern Manitoba, Canada - and its journey to build a self-sustaining farm for a northern Manitoba community that is only accessible via air and ice roads. Over the season, the community and its partners built the farm, and trained and employed youth to raise chickens, grow gardens, and develop a healthy food market that has become an important social enterprise initiative at the local level. This short film showcases moments from our forthcoming feature documentary and that aims to show how storytelling, food and community can come together to create positive change.

Life in the Indian Himalayas is one of hard agricultural labour. But in a village 2500m high, under the peaks of Nanda Devi, an energetic younger generation seek more

The following films were created from 100 inteviews with heritage ‘ stakeholders’s in Amman and Damascus in 2009-10 for an ESRC-funded research project examining the colonial modernities of the two cities. Each film covers a different theme of the relationship between cultural identity and heritage tourism and is edited using a different filmic style in order to examine how the way we produce knowledge affects the knowledge that is produced. In this way I aimed to show how filmmaking as a form of ethnography can help us do the following: 1. Reflect back on our research methods as researchers and how the methods we choose influence the knowledge we produce 2. Interrogate the mechanisms of representation within contemporary heritage discourse from the position of the knowledge producer and the intended audience. I. Amman – The linear format. Interview footage – including medium close-up shots of authority figures in offices – is intercut with shots of the urban landscape in question. ‘Cutaways’ are used to support or contradict verbal statements. Viewers are given the position of judge in that they feel they have been given access to all the main issues so they can come to a conclusion. This positionality encourages the viewer to identify with the expert, whose location (office) is separated from the subject (heritage). The ‘authorative’ perspective is somewhat destabilised by the omission of a voiceover.

Why is ‘Old’ Damascus so appealing to European and North American tourists and their nostalgic Orientalist imaginations?

The following films were created from 100 inteviews with heritage ‘ stakeholders’s in Amman and Damascus in 2009-10 for an ESRC-funded research project examining the colonial modernities of the two cities. Each film covers a different theme of the relationship between cultural identity and heritage tourism and is edited using a different filmic style in order to examine how the way we produce knowledge affects the knowledge that is produced. In this way I aimed to show how filmmaking as a form of ethnography can help us do the following: 1. Reflect back on our research methods as researchers and how the methods we choose influence the knowledge we produce. 2. Interrogate the mechanisms of representation within contemporary heritage discourse from the position of the knowledge producer and the intended audience. III. Signs of the Time – An exploration of the relationship between word, sound, image and text using still images, a split screen and a music soundtrack. The only words come from signage describing hotels, bars, cafes effectively mapping the tourist landscape. The soundtrack – a recording of a men singing at a wedding in Damascus – is taken from the same place the signs describe but recorded on a different occasion and connected via the editing process.

The following films were created from 100 inteviews with heritage ‘ stakeholders’s in Amman and Damascus in 2009-10 for an ESRC-funded research project examining the colonial modernities of the two cities. Each film covers a different theme of the relationship between cultural identity and heritage tourism and is edited using a different filmic style in order to examine how the way we produce knowledge affects the knowledge that is produced. In this way I aimed to show how filmmaking as a form of ethnography can help us do the following:br 1. Reflect back on our research methods as researchers and how the methods we choose influence the knowledge we produce. 2. Interrogate the mechanisms of representation within contemporary heritage discourse from the position of the knowledge producer and the intended audience. IV. Bitter Coffee – Highlighting the impact of film as collaboration via the ‘match cut’. Sequences of formal, officebased interviews with state representatives are intercut with noisy in-situ commentaries from Zaher’s friends, colleagues and neighbours in the Old City. The film cuts from the Minister of Tourism (in front of a portrait of President Assad) telling us ‘tourism is an image’ to a man selling bird seed to young Syrian couples who believe feeding pigeons in front of the Omayyad Mosque will help them conceive. Sound edits stray into the next scene so that banging from a metalwork shop resonates into the next scene where a retired French lighting engineer shows us his beautiful restored house in Nofara (a quarter in the Old City).

This film is a first step in developing a longer film and a method to re-use audio material gathered during fieldwork research on women's romantic/sex tourism in a new format of documentary film. In 2001-3 I carried out a series of interviews with women and men in the tourist resorts of the Sinai, Egypt about their romantic and sexual relationships. This research was published as 'Sex, tourism and the postcolonial encounter: Landscapes of longing in Egypt' (Ashgate 2010). It seems very apt to use film when doing research on geographical relationships in tourism. After all, as Said and the whole canon of postcolonial studies have noted, the power relations between the global North and South are played out through imagery (and writing) and nowhere is this more the case than in tourism where the landscapes and people of the South are reconfigured into aesthetic scenes for our sensual pleasure. So can these painful and damaging power imbalances also be upset and reworked through the use of images? If so how do you achieve this and visually represent the process of gendered and racial othering through imagery using film? Most men and women in these relationships wanted to remain anonymous and in any case filming them directly would leave them vulnerable to being stereotyped themselves as if they were being offered up to their audience as televisual voyeurism. So instead in this test short, I separated the audio from visual. Using the audio interviews as the soundtrack for the film, the visuals could do other work. Instead of sundrenched palm trees and beaches the film shows the landscape where European women come from not the landscapes they long for. In this way we can begin to understand how women's 'sex tourism' is about so much more than sex. This is a short experimental trailer for a longer version of the film.

Few users of social media and mobile devices recognise how their everyday swipes, likes, and retweets mobilises a global megastructure that spans the earth, impacts ecologies, and plunges under the sea. This experimental 20-minute video submerges the audience in the socio-ecological tangles of the materiality of the internet. It shows what can been seen and mediates the unseen. The video focuses not on the consumerism surrounding digital culture but rather on the symbiotic relationship between information infrastructure and the geographic, geologic, oceanographic, and atmospheric elements, immersing the audience in the textures, sounds, vertical vision, of the digital ecology of the North Atlantic. 'Points of Presence', through tracing several undersea cables, reveals how the internet is a material political object intertwined with the natural environment, human labour, and the mobility of data.

What and how is Ceuta? A group of men await the moment to continue their journey to Europe crossing the sea

Rio Tuba in Palawan is the site of one of the biggest nickel open pit mines in the Philippines.

A still film of spliced frames, shot on an art-geography residency on Oro, a former military island on the Finnish archipelago in January 2016. A film which examines the material tracings and ecological patternings of a multi-species island in transition: from fortress to conservation. Still frames with emergent possibility and shifts in scale. The sound of sea ice cracking, fence wires humming, concrete bunkers reverberating.

Shot through a computer screen, Bridges (Bosnia 20) forces the viewer to witness the war in Bosnia and its aftermath via-the-gaze of an unknown spectator, re-presenting images of war in a digital age.

An effort to capture the thingness and feel of pick-up basketball

Different people, filmed in New York, play with the wording of an official document in which immigrants to the US are described as beggars and thieves

Take a decadent Bingo palace and a young collective: is the aggregation force that springs from this local practice sufficient to consolidate and make this activity socially and spatially effective? This video stands as a spin off from the ongoing project Milanoccupata (Occupied Milan) which investigates the shift of meaning in occupancy and squatting practices from the Nineties in a global metropolis like Milan.

Told through the personal accounts of residents, business owners, politicians, developers, and clergy, Changing Face of Harlem explores the development and transition of the historic Black community over a ten- year span. The film tackles the pressing issues of class and cultural preservation as the neighborhood struggles to change for the better.

Passing Tides is the story of a young girl, Linh Vu who escaped Vietnam by boat, aged seven in 1979, with her father. After days in the China Sea, when the food had run out, a storm was brewing and Thai pirates were on the horizon, Linh and her father were rescued by a British ship. They were taken to a refugee camp in Singapore and then flown to a camp on Thorney island on the south coast. They finally settled in Hackney, East London. The film draws on Linh's own testimony and drawings of her journey.

This short animated film introduces the concept of spatial justice to general audiences, with particular reference to Edward Soja's work. The purpose of the short is to show the distributive geographic dimensions of place and justice by illustrating choices that affect every person and every space: the uneven accessibility of services and amenities, the impacts of byproducts, and economic vulnerabilities. The film concludes with ways to improve spatial justice, ranging from individual actions such as supporting the localization of food production to broader societal imperatives of improving sustainable infrastructure in remote communities.