Vertical AtlasVertical Atlas

A Guide to Satellite Surveillance, Anastasia Kubrak: A book that reveals and unfolds some of the myths surrounding satellites and their preconceived "neutrality", framing them as constellations and using design to uncover other narratives.

Asunder, Tega Brain, Julian Oliver, Bengt Sjölén: Asunder responds to a growing interest in the application of AI to critical environmental challenges by situating this approach as a literal proposition, combining state of the art climate and environmental simulation technology, a 144 CPU super-computer and Machine Learning image-making techniques. The result is a fictional 'environmental manager' that proposes and simulates future alterations to the planet to keep it safely within planetary boundaries, with what are often completely unacceptable or absurd results. In doing so, Asunder questions assumptions of computational neutrality, our increasingly desperate reach for techno-solutionist fixes to planetary challenges, and the broader ideological framing of the environment as a system.
Satellite, climate, geology, biodiversity and topography data for a series of terrestrial regions is used to generate an ever evolving series of environmental management plans where human and non-human agendas are combined and weighted in different ways. A central argument made by those encouraging the uptake of AI, is that data driven systems can depoliticize or neutralize decision making. Extended to the context of ecosystems, this could imply that ecological agendas are prioritized over human goals (and over the status quo where human systems of production are preserved at the expense of everything else).
The work is structured into discrete simulations for different regions, positioning ecosystem as computational surface. As cities are relocated, nations combined, coastlines straightened or rivers moved, the work shifts between humorous to preposterous, from uncannily eco-fetishistic to tediously bureaucratic.

Geocinema, Asia Bazdyrieva and Solveig Suess, Jessika Khazrik: Geocinema' considers planetary-scale sensory networks --cell phones, surveillance cameras, satellites, geosensors-- as a vastly distributed cinematic apparatus: a camera.
Sensing fragments of the earth, their operations generate terabytes of raw data, infrastructural architectures, obscured labour, dissonant weather, governmental policies, scientific management, environments and situations each participating in the changing of the earth's fabric through their own sets of scales and temporalities.
Here, the representation of earth is the sum of a decentralized editing process with its image anything but whole.

Open Air, Grayson Cooke in collaboration with painter Emma Walker, and with the music of The Necks: This project seeks to creatively image the forces that shape the Earth. It uses aerial imaging on two vastly divergent scales to produce two different material manifestations of these forces. Firstly, the project features motion-controlled aerial photography of the paintings and processes of Emma Walker. Secondly, set against these painted landscapes are time-lapse images of Australia as seen by Landsat satellites.

Oceans in Transformation, Daniela Zyman: Oceans in transformation is multi faceted research and presentation project curated by Territorial Agency's Daniela Zyman.
The oceans are changing very fast, yet knowledge of them is moving slowly and is enveloped in long-established forms of cultural separation and distinction between human activities at land and at sea. This division needs to be rethought to address the urgent and vast transformations that the seas are undergoing. One important part of is the production of huge digital, narrative maps: geospatial data visualisations of complex aggregated datasets relating to specific zones in the oceans.

An Introduction to Comparative Planetology, Lecture by Lukáš Likavčan, based on his book by the same title: Introduction to Comparative Planetology presents an intertwined analysis of visual cultures of imagining the Earth and the geopolitics of climate emergency. It compares different "figures" of the planet - the Planetary, the Globe, the Terrestrial, Earth-without-us and Spectral Earth - in order to assess their geopolitical implications. These implications are then mapped on respective prospects of these figures in developing an infrastructural space for planetary coordination of our design interventions against runaway global heating, and ultimately against mass species extinction.

Geographies of Power, Talk by Donald Weber: The production of worldviews has been radically altered by the convergence of airspace and dataspace, embodying state power in the 21st century. Donald Weber will present his research that explores the atmospheric topography of enclosure and the use of airborne machines which manufacture and condition the spaces of a securitized and surveilled society. Starting from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's inversion of surveillance into 'counter-veillance', where he sought to turn the prison inside out and 'watch the watchers', the research presented inverts the totalizing imperial reconnaissance of the US military drone to trace the geographies of drone warfare as an act of counter-reconnaissance. By using the method of (re)appropriating satellite imagery from Google Earth, the hidden indices of state power become intelligible, vivid, palpable and contestable. We can now see drone infrastructure not just as a geopolitical agent, but an infrastructure and ecosystem that encloses life itself. This research sets out to visualize the 'geography of our geography': the Geographies of Power.