Earth as image and operation

Quarterly Journal of Speech, 2018

We live in a world increasingly photographed from satellites, planes, and drones. Many scholars have viewed aerial imagery through a dystopian lens, largely due to its use by the state and its legacy of military applications. While problematic uses of aerial images persist, this paper theorizes rhetorical potentialities of aerial imagery. We posit how aerial imagery creates these potentialities through strategies related to questions of visibility, scale, and aesthetics. Using case studies that illuminate these strategies, we demonstrate how they can be used to resist state and corporate interests, constitute new social movements, and invite contemplation of otherwise repellent political subject matter. Ultimately, we argue that with increased technological access and the ability to reconfigure norms of expertise, the aerial view presents both opportunities for civic engagement and counterhegemonic potential.

Paisajes artificiales: virtuales, informales y edificados, 2020

This paper discusses the failures of the modern mapping project through the discussion of three creative works, and the writing of Bernard Stiegler. The works, the author's own, are in video and projection-mapping. They document significant delineators of geographic space-the 49th Parallel, the Greenwich Prime Meridian, and Canada's Dominion Land Survey-by harvesting satellite, aerial, and ground-view imagery from Google Earth, exposing anomalies and opacities in this ostensibly transparent map of the planet. The works have been presented in curated exhibitions in Winnipeg, Toronto, London, Greenwich, Brussels, and Manizales. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's writing on technology, especially technical memory, and with reference to colonial epistemologies, the paper elaborates on the video work as an amplification of the failure of the modern project to transparently map the world. Rather, such frameworks-in both their historical forms and their contemporary manifestation in the GPS and International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems-are rife with anomalies and errors. As the anomalies in image generated by platforms such as Google Earth suggest, and as Stiegler's argument demonstrates, such failures are (counterintuitively) built into the industrialization of knowledge. This is even more the case as the mapping project becomes a temporal archive. As Stiegler has put it in Technics and Time, the straight line generates the bent. The book: Este libro construye un conjunto de conceptos alrededor de la perspectiva investigativa de los paisajes artificiales. Estos se configuran como mundos posibles en evolución a través de procesos de simulación digital, autoorganización social y cocreación de devenires edificables, que desdibujan la frontera entre lo natural y lo artificial. Entre los paisajes artificiales se encuentran los paisajes virtuales, en los cuales se estudia la creación, conceptualización y simulación de entornos emergentes de la vida artificial, la cuántica, la biología molecular y las ciencias de la complejidad, que proporcionan una visibilidad producida a través de datos, sistemas complejos, ciencia y tecnología, así como a través de lógicas no clásicas y computación evolutiva.

72nd International Astronautical Congress (IAC), 2021

The first space flight made 60 years ago was certainly a pivotal moment in humankind's history. It was not just a matter of new knowledge; the direct and holistic experience of space is no less important than its scientific and technological visions and incorporates them. Since Gagarin's visual experience as the first man in space, and for all the following astronauts in orbit and beyond, what distinguishes them from the rest of humankind is a shared experience that has been described as a shift in perspective, to seeing earth and all its inhabitants as a whole. Astronauts report the experience of seeing the beauty of nature, of all of Mother Earth at once in orbit as profound. At the beginning of the Space Era, the holistic vision of Earth deeply rooted in the history of humankind, was the prerogative of cosmonauts and astronauts alone, but not anymore. This experience was shared widely due to the environmental initiatives of Al Gore, who proposed and justified the concept of the Digital Earth as a radically new perspective, providing full geocentric situational awareness through the seamless integration of geocentric context beyond the hierarchies imposed by the maps and their distorted scale-bound division of geodata. The Digital Earth project aims to work at the cutting edge of developments in geography, natural sciences and information technology to provide a simulated, enhanced and updated digital twin of Earth. Full of beauty, but also information. The goal of recreating Gagarin's gaze, in the year celebrating the 60th anniversary of the first man in space, is achieved by sharing the visual experiences of astronauts for a simulation of Earth with different scenarios to be experienced in VR or by PCs and smartphones. This use of VR/AR would increase the popularity and impact of space exploration and DE applications: Earth-orbiting satellites, ground-based observations, and other technologies for collecting, analyzing and visualizing data about global phenomena, such as climate sciences and modeling, health emergencies and scenarios about alternative futures, environmental and cultural heritage, and sustainability. In particular, applications for Digital Health Earth (DHE) involving global and local visualization of health and environmental data would fulfill and interoperate with existing monitoring systems concerned with environmental and public safety. Public health policies, but also political discourse would benefit from such a gaze on real time situations at regional, national and worldwide level.

Through technologies of communication and new media practices, such as speculative media interfaces, our posthuman society combats a globalized "technosphere" causing the planet and its inhabitants to undergo a profound crisis. Such new media practices, in their technique and epistemological aspects, stand as the provocative potential of the dialectics of nature and culture and its role in critically exploring the implications of emerging technologies in the communication processes in urban space. The hypothesis is that speculative media interfaces can be used to explore the coexistence of human and nonhuman futures in urban space under the environmental crisis today. I ask how interface's 'non-human eye' as a communication device can be related to Bernard Stiegler's (1952-2020) endeavor to understand technical evolution by provoking a revision of the whole of a non-human agency in history? What 'otherness', such as Benjamin's 'angel of history' (Unmensch), may have revolutionary forces that

Media (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 75-90.

2020

The Anthropocene casts a long shadow over this project. 'Inverted Landscapes: Photomedia and the More-than-Representational' is a response to the need, brought on by the climate crisis, to conceptualise nature differently. Composed of equal parts creative work and written exegesis, this practice-led PhD fractures the logic of pictorial and semiotic conventions of photomedia, forming inverted landscapes that contend with the material and political implications of visually representing the Anthropocene. Through undermining the material semblance and representational structures of photomedia depictions of nature, the imaging apparatus is exposed, bringing attention to how humans, non-human nature, and imaging technologies are entangled.

MediaN, vol. 10 No. 1 "Art& Infrastructure" issue, 2014

This essay considers a series of contemporary artworks produced by Trevor Paglen, collectively titled The Other Night Sky. Using algorithmic strategies to photograph classified surveillance satellites, Paglen's images explore the forms of visibility and knowledge produced by a global infrastructure that circulates around the planet. The Other Night Sky project presents a visual technology and material reality that hovers outside our awareness even as, and perhaps because, it so thoroughly surrounds and encloses us, so pervasively mediates and structures the way we see our world and imagine beyond it.

2014

How do people come to know the world? How do they get a sense of place and space? Arguably, one of the ways in which they do this is through the practice of remote sensing, among which satellite imagery is one of the most widespread and potent tools of engaging, representing and constructing space. This paper argues that satellite imagery is not only a powerful means of gathering geographical and geopolitical information -for instance through overhead surveillance and the reconnaissance of sites considered suspicious -but is also decisive in producing geographical and geopolitical imaginations. Based on a discussion of the iconic satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula by night, this article shows how satellite imagery constructs -seemingly by itself -North Korea as a distant, foreign and secluded other place in world politics. Referred to in the paper as 'visual spatial imaginaries', remote sensing shapes how we imagine places, spaces and sites in what is widely believed to be a terra incognita of the world.

This article introduces the concept of geopolitical affect in landscape photography and video, focusing on two series by the US artist Connie Samaras: V.A.L.I.S. (2004-5) and Edge of Twilight (2011–2018). The article draws on the cybernetic affect theory of the mid-century US psychologist Silvan S Tomkins as well as the artist's own concept of speculative landscape and critique of identity politics to consider surface, movement, and the face in landscape photography. As well, a photographic and audiovisual theory of geopolitical drive and affect, based on the work of Tomkins, is proposed.

2017