Procedural companion: Cops, Detectives, Courts & Cages follows policing, evidence, courts and prisons at source level; Criminality maps the counterfield.

Rule and reality

A recurrent distinction separates the written or stated rule from the force that actually produces compliance. Laws can be fictive, ignored or contradictory while cameras, databases, contracts, gatekeepers and physical control remain brutally effective.

Institution as character

BLUE HELL, L.E.W.A.N., fictional police departments, schools, corporations, leagues and clinics often behave almost like people. They speak, classify, route, reward and punish. Conversely, individual people are repeatedly described as companies, gateways or containers, making the boundary between person and institution unstable in both directions.

Legibility and reduction

Administrative systems must make subjects legible in order to act on them. The work repeatedly worries that the categories required for management — diagnosis, identity, score, risk, audience, legality — also reduce the life they claim to describe.

Selected works

Crossings

Normative Collapse / Rule ≠ Reality · Self as Infrastructure · Portable Institution