x:
y:
[16/10/2024]
Architectural Aerial Photography
After the First World War, a coinciding of technological improvements within the fields of photography, aviation, and print media facilitated a surge in civil aerial photography. Each nation at war had invested increasing amounts in their newly instated airforces to prevent falling behind the enemies’ technological advances. With the Treaty of Versailles the hope for a lasting peace in Europe’s heterogenous nationscape diminished the immediate need for aerial reconnaissance: Military aviation lost significant funding. The British urban planner Patrick Abercrombie commented in his article “Aerial Photography and Town Planning” in 1919 that “it is to be hoped that the great talent which has been evolved […] during the war will not be lost in peace.” (Abercrombie 1919, 705) In fact, many former military pilots trained in surveillance tried to establish a civil career in aerial photography. The images taken by Swiss photographer and aeronaut Walter Mittelholzer (1894 – 1937) exemplify this international tendency.
Flights during the first decades of the 20th century were dangerous and uncomfortable adventures. Exposed to the elements and likely to crash, the experience of travelling in an airplane was still far from the mode of mass transportation we know today. Therefore, aerial photography was the most promising industry in civil aviation in the 1920s. Founded in 1919, Mittelholzer’s Company Ad Astra Aero was one of several small ventures conquering the Swiss airspace. Ad Astra Aero initially specialized in aerial photographs of villages, estates, and factories and sold them to the owners as memorabilia or advertisement. (see also Lugon 2013; Surber 2014; 2017)
Another area of use for aerial photography was the planning practice. At a time when industrialization caused most cities to break out of their historic walls and expand into the surrounding countryside, aerial photography handed urbanists the needed instrument to grasp the urban organism, whose scale had slipped out of their control. The photo taken from a plane suggested an accurate display of the life below in its entirety. However, photos taken from above implied not only objectivity and totality. The novelty of aerial photography as a technology gave aerial images themselves an air of innovation.
The fact that the photograph was published almost immediately after being taken and that the architect joined Mittelholzer during the flight indicates the importance of the aerial photo for the article. Furthermore, the selection and layout of the article’s images show the strong emphasis the author put on the technological novelty. To propagate the innovation of the architectural project, Mittelholzer was hired to document the clinic from a technologically superior perspective.
All translations from German by author.
Cited Works:
Abercrombie, Patrick. 1919. “Aerial Photography and Town Planning.” Country Life. 45 (1170): 703–5.
Lugon, Olivier. 2013. “The Aviator and the Photographer: The Case of Walter Mittelholzer.” In Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin, 147–62. London: I.B. Tauris.
[s. n.]. 1932. “Die Privatklinik Hirslanden A.-G.” Text/html,application/pdf,text/html, April. https://doi.org/10.5169/SEALS-582482.
[s.n.]. 1932. “Die ‘Privatklinik Hirslanden’ in Zürich: Architekt Hermann Weideli, Zürich (Schluss).”
Schweizerische Bauzeitung 100 (2): 20. https://doi.org/10.5169/seals-45525.
Surber, Kaspar. 2014. “Eine Fliegende Dunkelkammer. Walter Mittelholzers ‘Afrikaflüge’ (1926-1934)
Als Mediale Unternehmungen Um Die Gründung Der Swissair.” Lizentiatsarbeit der Philosophischen Fakultät, Zürich: Universität Zürich.
———. 2017. Walter Mittelholzer Revisited: Aus Dem Fotoarchiv von Walter Mittelholzer = From the Walter Mittelholzer Photography Archive. Vol. 6. Bilderwelten. Fotografien Aus Dem Bildarchiv Der ETH-Bibliothek. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess.
[17/10/2024]
Astronoetics
or Hans Blumenberg's glossary of a cosmological phenomenology of the lifeworld
- October 4th, 1957: The invention of astronoetics after launching Sputnik 1
-
A guide to close reading Blumenberg's Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997) (The Completeness of the Stars).01
- Relevance & extension of astronoetics for planetary thinking in the 21st century
The anchor's comparison between Sputnik 1 and a vacuum cleaner, repeated and amplified with a variety of images and sounds in television, radio and print media, is an appropriate example of what Alfred Schütz, founder of the phenomenological sociology, called “thinking as usual” back in 1944: “This ‘thinking as usual’, as we may call it, (…) includes the "of-course" relevant to a particular social group which Robert S. Lynd describes in such a masterly way – together with their inherent contradictions and ambivalence – as the "Middletown-spirit". Thinking as usual may be maintained as long as some basic assumptions hold true, namely: that life and especially social life will continue to be the same as it has been so far, that is to say, that the same problems requiring the same solutions will recur and that, therefore, our former experiences will suffice for mastering future situation.”03 That the kind of ‘suddenness’ and ‘strangeness’ of the Sputnik 1 case could not simply be absorbed or completely dissolved in an ‘of-course’ attitude, and that even Lynd’s "Middletown-spirit" could not simply undermine the open questions, is shown in one of Hans Blumenberg’s commentaries – which he called “glosses”04 – in his book Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne (1997) under the heading XV. Everything as before - everything as always?: “In October 1957, one of the three largest nations in the world was crestfallen and humiliated because a tiny and meaningless device from near-Earth space was emitting beeping sounds over radio waves that no one knew for sure whether they really meant anything [...]. It was an annoying sound, multiplied by the media and in everyone's ear who could not have heard it directly.
The consequences of this simple fact were unbelievable and remain so to this day. It was the foundation of an institution of rivalry».05 The enervating effect on Blumenberg’s ears apparently did not lead him to minimise the beeping as a usual disturbance in everyday life. On the contrary: he captured it both in the uncertainty of its lifeworld interpretation and in the ‘unbelievable’ consequence of an institutionalized geopolitical rivalry. Blumenberg specifies ‘rivalry’ as a continuation of war by other means. It becomes an arena of the proxy battle between the superpowers USA and USSR at a time when a ‘real’ battle is out of the question. According to Blumenberg, astronautics is comparable to the Olympics and other sporting events: What counts are records. It doesn't matter what the astronauts or the ‘Russian’ dog Laika do and experience up in their space capsules, the only thing that is interesting is “the durability of the stay and the clear countability of its size as duration.”06 Both Blumenberg’s concern and observation are reflected in the TIME Magazine of October 21st, 1957, with its headline – COLD WAR: The Beeper's Message – and its conclusion: “The Russians had scored heavily.”07 And the lead reads: “As Sputnik whirled serenely overhead, a startled world looked at Russia with new respect.” Remarkable is the wide variety of reactions that the TIME Magazine listed apart from those of the two superpowers: they came from Bangkok, Beirut, London, Paris, Indonesia and the non-aligned Afro-Asian nations. From Bonn they quoted the growling Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer: “Five hundred and sixty miles is only the distance from Bonn to Vienna. It does not prove they can fire anything parallel to the earth over a distance of many thousand miles.”08
Adenauer’s reaction not only points to the collective fear in people’s minds that the “tiny and pointless” beeping device above their heads could soon have turned into an intercontinental weapon, but also how Robert S. Lynd’s so-called "Middletown-spirit" was nevertheless also evident in West Germany, with the attempt to break down the extraordinary dimensions to the more familiar geography of Bonn-Vienna. However, Adenauer's downsizing-strategy did not seem to present a long-term ‘as usual’ solution, as the mood of upheaval in the scientific birthplace of Hans Blumenberg's astronoetics showed.
The “Sputnik-shock” also reached the small university town of Kiel. Wolfgang Bargmann, the President of Kiel University, brain anatomist and also Vice President of the German Research Foundation, called on his local colleagues to step up their efforts and overcome this technological “disgrace”, what Hans Blumenberg's echoed in his very last gloss of Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne: “The circulars were notorious in which he called for programs and grant applications, and they took on a new, more urgent tone in October 1957, when the first false comet, the beeping artificial moon called ‘Sputnik’ orbited the earth, triggering the so-called Sputnik-Schock.”09
The philosopher did not want to evade this appeal and invented with his neologism “astronoetics” a cunning response to Bargmann's slogan “Let's catch up!”. It was “the ironic answer to the question asked everywhere: “And what do we have in comparison?”.10 However, where brain physiology could attempt to obtain expensive microscopes, the philosopher was left without such tools: “Anyone who was embarrassed by the inadequacy of bare brain functions ultimately had to use them; at least to simulate the catch-up process. The author gave in to this urge and applied for an undetermined amount of funding for the purpose of exploring the dark side of the moon through pure thinking.” 11
The fact that the general plight called for ‘invention’ and ‘irony’, ‘false comets’ and ‘beeping artificial moons’ did not make the philosopher Blumenberg an isolated case, but another contemporary witness with wit: WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES was the title of Life magazine's Sputnik reports (s. again Fig.1). Less than two weeks had passed when the magazine not only mentioned the new Sputnik cocktail, based on vodka of course, but also photographed the first “Space Fashions” for adults and children. New York’s department stores Macy’s even dressed its employees in self-designed space suits, who then presented new “Space Toys” to the young costumers (Fig.2). In addition to a common thinking-as-usual, people also developed their very own mechanisms for appropriating the new – and in reality so distant – situation in order to render or make it tangible and thus less frightening. Blumenberg as well asks in his last gloss: «What was left for the astronauts who stayed at home? Certainly not only to make glosses, but also as cheerful compensation for the fact that this home did not want to become more cosy.»12 Guided by politics, media, science and consumerism, and furthermore supplied with the rivalry between two superpowers, the public thus crossed the threshold into a new, very real and uncomfortable dimension of collective world-space-imagination. The Historian Angela Schwarz describes this new dimension as a multi-layered “battle for the cosmos”: “The battle of ideologies, social systems, armies and technologies had been expanded to include the battlefield of ideas about the appropriation of the cosmos.” 13
1. Variations - A year and a half after Blumenberg’s death, The Completeness of the Stars was published in 1997 and comprises a collection of around 150 often very short glosses. The author himself organized them into 22 sections with titles such as V. A look back at the earth's inhabitants, VIII. Space-lust - before take-off, IX. Einstein, XII. The intensified view into space, XVII. What remains is the environment or XIX. Lunar physics etcetera. What connects the glosses and sections methodically is said in reference to Husserl's phenomenology: “Astronoetics does not consist of any science fiction, but rather of thought experiments that can be assigned to the phenomenological method of free variation (...)”.20 Quite inconspicuously and in the silence of a night-time-reading, The Completeness of the Stars begins with Two Nocturnes by Hans Carossa. And already in the second gloss with the title-giving headline, we learn what constitutes the specificality of astronoetic variations: «Carossa, as Goethe's successor, would have had the choice between excess and infiniteness [of the stars]. He brought them to the measure, to the completeness of the stars.(...) Stubbornness regardless of Goethe».21 Carossa's example – contrary to Goethe's pathos formulae – makes it clear on a small scale how Blumenberg, in the sense of the poetic function à la Roman Jakobson, always provides a rubric of meaning as a paradigm in order to vary it freely on the syntagmatic axis in the following glosses22. Like an observational satellite, Blumenberg orbits e.g. in the rubric II. Vertical Drop Studies with a single Wittgenstein sentence - Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe - and varies it with glosses on Thales of Miletus, the mythological fall of Icarus, Voltaire's version of Newton's apple story or surprises at the end of the section with the gloss: Was Freud also the Newton of the soul?23 With each case and “falling”, the horizon and angle of view varies; with each new shot, something becomes sharper or gains in contrast. As a further example, in the rubric VI. Under the moon with the gloss The moon as a poetic phenomenon, Blumenberg states in comparison to the ‘despotic sun’ pointedly and pragmatically: “So we need neither moon creams nor moonglasses.”24
2. Thought experiments – Without being noticed by Gagarin, Armstrong and their colleagues, Blumenberg maintained his ground station for over three decades – well beyond the long decade of space travel from the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1958 to the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. As a newspaper reader, television viewer and radio listener, he logged and archived the ‘mixed messages’ of the news agencies on The Space Race and used their data for his thought experiments. These experiments are anything but unrealistic or limited to the latest NASA reports. Blumenberg's astronoetic explorations are always a Socratic means for him to reflect on the relationships in the lifeworld above the stars and among the stars.
In his mind’s eye, he entered e.g. the geodesic dome (Fig. 3) of the Spaceship Earth at Walt Disney’s Park ‘Magic Kingdom’ (Florida) and got involved in its entertainment value: “The center and signature of this social artefact is a huge sphere flashing with aluminum scales, which, according to the concept and will of its designers, is intended to symbolize the earth as a spaceship. Within this sphere, a railway travels through the history of humanity into its future within a quarter of an hour.”25 On the one hand, Blumenberg acknowledges that every great event in human history, such as the moon landing, has its own entertainment value and recognises the necessary relief from reality in his technical simulation in the amusement park; on the other hand he also analyses its price in the next paragraph: “Spaceship Earth is a slander. Earth is the very place where all spaceships return to, unless they are mere robots or probes. Earth is the opposite of a spaceship. It is the zero point of all coordinate systems in which conscious space journeys can move. The sensation of Florida, to see the earth itself from the outside, as it were, is bought with the falsification of its ground function.”26
3. Leitmotif - What Blumenberg corrects here with Earth as the “zero-point” can be understood as an astronoetical continuation of Husserl’s manuscript series, which are usually named with the short title The earth does not move (1934). (
We are currently witnessing patterns of human use of the earth that are bringing about a transformation of the earth system that is no longer merely ecological, but geological: they are short-circuiting and changing the condition of the planet. At the same time, earth-spanning systems of data aggregation and calculation enable researchers to track these changes in simulated real time and thus put “planetarity” on our (mental) map (s. Fig.4)32. The architect couple Eyal and Ines Weizman e.g. use before & after satellite-images to show how cleared forests, contaminated areas and melting icebergs are the consequences of overexploitation, war and climate change. What is missing in these images from a vertical perspective from above are two things: on the one hand, the event itself, and on the other, the story behind it: “Such a spatial observation attempts to fill the gap between the images by means of a narrative - but this is neither simple nor clear.”33 A gap and a problem – as Blumenberg glosses aside on The World Second of an event in general – that has long accompanied the vertical perspective: “The epic form of movement is horizontal. All can be reached by all on paths, even if they are sea or air routes. Even when the hero goes to the underworld, he does not overcome the distance by falling or on a rope. Jesus can only be told about when he is wandering (...). That is why the Ascension, as the vertical final event, falls outside all frames of narratability.”34
With their publication Thinking planets, the authors Armen Avanessian and Daniel Felb aim to shed new light on this kind of narrative difficulties with an astrobiologically informed theory that grasps Earth just as one data point in an almost infinite series of planets and planetary histories. For them, astrobiology makes it even possible to temporalize the transition of an unmoved earthly “ark”: “We think we could be in the beginning stages of a so-called Transition 9.
By that we mean another Major Evolutionary Transition as theorized by biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, describing how evolution over time adds new mechanisms and agencies to its toolbox, from multicellularity to social insects to human language.”35 Common model representations of planets, which are placed next to each other like differently colored glass spheres, convey a reductive and inanimate planetary image. The same applies to Google Earth, which confuses the Earth with a digitally assembled patchwork of present-day snapshots of a fully mapped and static globe: “To astrobiologically informed eyes, planets appear less as inert lumps of matter or as snapshots, but rather as time sequences and time figures.”36 Astrobiology becomes the “ultimate horizon” for them (s. Fig.5).
Instead of always looking at the one story of one Earth, this theoretical horizon operates with serialization and simultaneity of stories of the Earth-Planet: “Instead, we are fascinated by the space of all possible histories of the Earth: we love the planetary model. It is what we want, and in a sense we are much more willing to inhabit this model space than the abyss of the one sequence of events that took place. In this way, astrobiology gives us quality of life.”37
Hans Blumenberg would not be a spoiler of such efforts to integrate theory into that kind of informed lifeworld, but he points out: “The theory of the lifeworld is always also one of the shallow penetration of theory into its consciousness.”38 And he does this by pointing out that it is no coincidence that language in general and specifically Kant and Husserl do not provide us with a plural in relation to reason or the singular of lifeworld. Meanwhile, the two authors would like to believe in the philosophy of Benjamin Bratton's planetary scale computed “sapience" and quote him as follows: “You would see something unusual: the sprouting of clouds of satellites, and the wrapping of the land and seas wires made of metal and glass. You would see the sudden appearance of an intricate artificial planetary crust capable of tremendous feats of communication and calculation, enabling planetary self-awareness – indeed, planetary sapience.”39 In terms of profile, Blumenberg would probably weigh up the pros and cons of such “planetary sapience” in two ways: Both with a gloss for An Academy for Processing the Disappointments of Reason40 and a sober plea for “pensiveness”. “The Academy” would ask questions like: What can we hope for and think when knowledge no longer fulfills our demands for meaning? What happens when a planetary event itself no longer occurs and mediated with an 18-seconds recorded beep-signal? When a tremendous planetary event transcends the concepts of understanding and develops technically, gradually and continuously unnoticed? How can space in general and lifeworldly be grasped when earth appears as a technological matter with a planetary scale? Altough as a measurable thing, but no longer as easy manageable and stowable like a vacuum cleaner?
The world does not want to become more comfortable at home, Blumenberg said at the end of The Completeness of the Stars, and added the sober plea in his speech for the Sigmund Freud Prize in 1980: “Pensiveness means: not everything remains as self-evident as it was. That is all.”41 In a free variation, astronoeticians would add from a cosmological point of view: That's almost everything – and add in a nuanced, but also confident manner of an astronoetica activa – or not everything yet.
Notes
- All English translations of the following German sources are by the author (ET).
- Watch the recording of the CBS News Special broadcast on: https://tinyurl.com/yyqk6b6b (last seen on October 13th 2024)
- Schütz (1944), p. 502.
- According to OxfordLanguages a “short [polemical] commen-tary (in the press, radio or television) on current events or problems”.
- Blumenberg (2011), p. 414.
- Ibid. p. 414.
- Time-Magazine (1957), p. 28.
- Ibid. p. 28.
- Blumenberg (2011), p. 547.
- Ibid. p. 548.
- Ibid. p. 548.
- Ibid. p. 549.
- Schwarz (2009), p. 55.
- Blumenberg (2011), p. 548.
- Ibid. p. 549.
- Cf. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd. 6, Basel 1984. Section 874.
- Ibid. p. 188.
- Ibid. p. 188.
- Ibid. p. 321.
- Ibid. 321.
- Ibid. p. 18f.
- Jakobson (1979), p. 94.
- Cf. all the “drop”-glosses in Blumenberg (2011) p. 42-76.
- Ibid. p. 177.
- Ibid. p. 538.
- Ibid. p. 539.
- Husserl (1940), p. 312.
- Ibid. p. 312
- Blumenberg (2011), p. 482.
- Fragio Gistau (2023) p. 114.
- Ibid. p. 115.
- Cf. Weizman & Weizman (2024), p. 36: "The third major wave of destruction in Cambodia is a direct result of climate change. Recent studies of Landsat-images show that the Khmer Rouge's irrigation system is not only functional, but has also been steadi-ly expanded. Thanks to these developments, supported by the World Bank and other international organisations, agricultural yields and self-sufficiency in Cambodia have increased.” Ibid.
- Weizman&Weizman (2024), p. 8.
- Blumenberg (2011), p.34.
- Cf. the interview with Daniel Falb, one of the authours of Thinking Planets, including the reference and ideas to the image (Fig.5): https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/interview-philosophy-of-nature-40 (last seen: 14 October 2024)
- Avanessian & Falb 2024, p. 40.
- Avanessian & Falb 2024, p. 43.
- Blumenberg (2011), p.482.
- Avanessian & Falb 2024. p. 17.
- Blumenberg (2011), p.501–504.
- Blumenberg (1981), p. 61.
Bibliography
Avannessian, Armen & Falb, Daniel (2024): Planeten Denken. Leipzig: Merve Verlag.
Blumenberg Hans (1981) “Nachdenklichkeit”. Dankrede. In: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (II/1980). Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, pp. 57–61.
Blumenberg, Hans (2011): Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Fragio Gistau, Alberto (2023): Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie des Kosmos. Baden-Baden: Karl-Alber-Verlag.
Husserl, Edmund (1940): Grundlegende Untersuchun-gen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Räumlich-keit der Natur. In: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, hrsg. von Marvin Farber. Harvard Uni-versity Press: Cambridge, Mass., pp. 307-326.
Jakobson, Roman (1979): Poetik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Schuetz, Alfred (1944): The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology. In: American Journal of Sociology. May 1944, Vol. 49, No. 6, pp. 499- 507.
Schwarz, Angela (2009): Das Tor in eine neue Dimensi-on? Sputnik, Schock und die Popularität der Naturwis-senschaften. In: Die Spur des Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter, hrsg. v. Igor J. Polianski und Matthias Schwartz. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 31–55.
Snow, C.P. (1961): The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weizman, Eyal & Ines (2024): Vorher und Nachher. Die Architektur der Katastrophe. Zürich: Diaphanes.
Further readings
Meyer, Martin F. (1999): HANS BLUMENBERG: Die Voll-zähligkeit der Sterne. In: Philosophischer Literaturanzei-ger, 52(2). Meisenheim: pp. 120–125.
Zill, Rüdiger (2009): “Die Erforschung der Rückseite des Mondes durch reines Denken: Technikphilosophie zwi-schen Sputnik 1 und Apollo 11” In: Die Spur des Sputnik. Kulturhistorische Expeditionen ins kosmische Zeitalter, hg. v. Igor J. Polianski und Matthias Schwartz. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, pp. 332–349.
Zill, Rüdiger (2011): “Zu den Sternen und zurück. Die Entstehung des Weltalls als Erfahrungsraum und die Inversion des menschlichen Erwartungshorizonts” In: Michael Moxter (Hrsg,): Erinnerung an das Humane. Beiträge zur phänomenologischen Anthropologie Hans Blumenbergs. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 300–326.
[05/08/2024]
Earthscape
Today, it has become commonplace for us, almost a matter of course, to see the Earth represented in a photograph. It is therefore hard to imagine how shocking it was, on a psychological and perceptual level, when, in the 1960s, for the first time in the history of our species, humans saw a representation of their planet from space (Morawski, Vegetti). Having now become accustomed to the ubiquity of the extraterrestrial gaze, we take its recent novelty for granted and fail to appreciate the revolutionary impact of that first “ecumenical disorientation” (Boatto 2013, p. 25). An event that literally pulled the earth out from under our feet and returned it to us as an image. At the very moment when humanity was able to enjoy the view of the Earth from ‘outside’ – from a real and no longer merely theoretical or fantastic exteriority (as had been the case for philosophers, scientists and men of letters such as Cicero, Kepler, Votlaire and Alexander von Humboldt) – new ‘worldviews’ emerged, with profound asthetic, political, metaphysical and moral implications. The intuition of the Earth as a cosmic object made it possible to experience a previously unprecedented sense of distance and estrangement from our living spaces. This scopic experience had a strong existential value, redefining the coordinates through which the phenomenological reality of the Earth was experienced, imagined, and practised.
Until the first photographs of the Earth were taken from space, humanity had to rely on imagination alone (Cosgrove 2001): however high one climbed, to the top of a mountain, a tower or a belfry, the unity of the globe remained inaccessible from its surface, and to represent it required an act of imagination. We thought geo-graphy as we saw it on maps and could not free our minds from this cartographic drawing (Turri 1998). However, these were often allegories of power with a predominantly decorative function; or, in any case, they were representations that, like milk, have an expiration date (Monmonier 1991, p. 56). Instead, since space travel is no longer a mere fantasy, even though none of us has ever been in space, we feel that we know what the Earth really looks like, that we have a true, no longer distorted view of its geography. And this is so, because when we think of the Earth we now imagine it as a function of the visual products of space travel.
Two photographs in particular have come to exemplify a veritable ‘visiotype’ (Grevsmühl, 2019) of our planetary imagination, forming a kind of ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin, 1972) that is shared by the whole of humanity: Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972) (Poole 2008). The former depicts the planet rising against the backdrop of the arid lunar soil, thereby bearing witness to the epiphany of humankind’s inaugural encounter with the Earth as a cosmic object. In a word: its discovery (Morawski 2023). The second photograph, taken in December 1972 by Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison (Jack) Schmitt, depicts the totality of the Earth, suspended in space. To this day, it is considered to be the most widely used photograph in the history of mankind; but above all, it is the one that definitively sanctioned the entry of the Earth into the mirror stage, contributing to the objectification of our image of the world, which thus obtained a cognitive proof that had never existed before.
Cited Works:
Anders W., 50 Years After «Earthrise», a Christmas Eve Message from Its Photographer, URL: https://www.space.com/42848-earthrise-photo-apollo-8-legacy-bill-anders.html
Benjamin W., A Short History of Photography, trans. S. Mitchell, “Screen”, 13/1 (1972), pp. 5-26.
Boatto A., Lo sguardo dal di fuori, Castelvecchi, Roma 2013.
Brand S., Photography Changes Our Relationship to Our Planet, .Smithsonian Photography Initiative, 2008, URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20080530221651/http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31
Cosgrove D., Apollo’s Eye. A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore-London 2001.
Grevsmühl S., Planet Earth Seen From Space: A Very Brief Visual History, “Contemporânea - revista de sociologia da UFSCar”, 9/1 (2019), pp. 37-53.
Mitchell W.J.T., Landscape and Power, University of Chicago Press, Chicago-London 1994.
Morawski T., La Terra digitale: sulla Terra come medium, in T. Morawski, M. Vegetti (Eds.), Earthscapes. Le conseguenze della visione della Terra dallo spazio, Donzelli, Roma 2023, pp. 75-88.
Poole R., Earthrise. How Man First Saw the Earth, Yale University Press, New Haven-London 2008.
Turri E., Il paesaggio come territorio. Dal territorio vissuto al territorio rappresentato, Marsilio, Venezia 1998.
Vegetti M., L’ultima rivoluzione spaziale globale. Il mondo nell’epoca delle imprese cosmonautiche, “Thaumazein”, 10/2 (2022), pp. 295-314.
[22/11/2024]
Feminist critique(s)
and the View from Above
Looking from above and gazing from afar has historically been entangled with a distancing moment, which feminist critique has a lot to say about. As it turns out, though, since earlier developments of satellite vision up until now, this relationship between feminist critique and remote sensing is both a field of different positions and has gone through some significant conceptual shifts. The role of ‘distance’ has been reassessed within the field of feminist critique of remote sensing, with the result that especially over the last three decades, it has been put into question what it means to ‘critical’ towards as well as with remote sensing from a feminist point of view. 01
In the 1990s, one significant line of critique has scrutinized masculinist and positivist underpinnings as a general and indispensable part of Remote Sensing and GIS.02 The extreme distance of their perspective made the satellite’s perspective the masculinist gaze per se. Some positions in the 1990s (with notable theoretical borrowings from post-Heideggerian as well as eco-feminist thought) have stressed that through whole Earth imagery we would arrive at managerial, controlling, and detached views of the planet03, at times resembling a voyeuristic view.04 This would result in nothing but a “distancing flavor”. 05
From there on, it is striking that within three decades, the role of distance seems to have obtained a different ‘flavor’ – in fact, one that is to a certain degree more in line with feminist critiques. A multiplicity of factors play into this: the explicit critique of feminist critiques of GIS and RS around the 2000s, or, the question of critique between epistemology and practice-orientation; the impact of feminism in geography and discourses on fieldwork; the rising interest of feminist critiques in technology; as well as the imbrication of remote technologies in our everyday lives and their massive use in detecting environmental and humanitarian crises. In these widely ranging factors, the role of distance has (also) been rendered productive for feminist concerns. Researchers see problematics of masculinism also in the context of unquestioned access (to the field) and re-evaluate physical distance in its productive relationship to access and care.
Feminist approaches to remote sensing increasingly undermine an assumed division of labor between masculine knowing-from-distance and feminine caring-in-proximity.06 How criticism of remote sensing and GIS has been integrated into its practices is particularly visible in feminist data visualization in GIS;07 critical mapping practices that experiment with ‘feminist ways of looking’, alternative geographies, and DIY tools;08 in mapped relationships between, for example, gender, employment, and childcare availabilities;09 or numerous other co-developments of gender identity and embodiment in the uses of digital geographies.10 Especially after the 2000s, feminist critiques show that geographical distance is not the only, and at times not the decisive factor when it comes to care(-lessness) from both near and far.11 Feminist critique has notably reappropriated the concept of distance, and technologically mediated remote sensing has become an increasing factor through which feminist concerns can be approached.
For further reading, see:
Kroth, Lilian. ‘Remote Sensing and Feminist Critique: Reappropriations of Sensing across Distance’. Environment and Planning F (2024), pre-print online.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26349825241283838.
Notes on the image:
Still from Satellite Séance, 2020; Video by open-weather in collaboration with Matthew Philips, Hanna Rullmann and Jol Thoms. Description of open-weather, see the project’s website: “Open-weather is a feminist experiment in imaging and imagining the earth and its weather systems using DIY tools. We weave speculative storytelling with low cost hardware and open-source software to transform our relations to a planet in climate crisis.” Imagery such as that of projects like open-weather cover integrate satellite technologies and feminist fieldwork methodologies, especially when they ‘plug in’ (in this case, NOAA-19 weather satellite). The image/ film still captures the imbrication of satellite imagery and ‘grounding’ remote data in a form of juxtaposition, while maintaining an openness to imaginative and interpretive aspects (of distance).
Notes
- Lilian Kroth, ‘Remote Sensing and Feminist Critique: Reappropriations of Sensing across Distance’, Environment and Planning F (2024) pre-print online, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26349825241283838.
- Susan M. Roberts and Richard H. Schein, ‘Earth Shattering: Global Imagery and GIS’, in Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, ed. John Pickles (New York, London: Guilford Press, 1995), 171–95; Michael R. Curry, ‘Geographic Information Systems and the Inevitability of Ethical Inconsistency’, in Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems, ed. John Pickles (New York, London: Guilford Press, 1995), 68–87; Yaakov Jerome Garb, ‘Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings of Contemporary Earth Imagery’, in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, ed. Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein (Sierra Club Books, 1990), 264–78; L. Bondi and M. Domosh, ‘Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism and Geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, no. 2 (1992): 199–213, https://doi.org/10.1068/d100199.
- Roberts and Schein, ‘Earth Shattering: Global Imagery and GIS’, 183.
- Roberts and Schein, 189.
- Garb, ‘Perspective or Escape? Ecofeminist Musings of Contemporary Earth Imagery’, 266–67.
- Karen T. Litfin, ‘The Gendered Eye in the Sky: A Feminist Perspective on Earth Observation Satellites’, Frontiers (Boulder) 18, no. 2 (1997): 26–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346964.
- Mei-Po Kwan, ‘Feminist Visualization: Re-Envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 4 (2002): 645–61, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8306.00309; LaDona Knigge and Meghan Cope, ‘Grounded Visualization: Integrating the Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Data through Grounded Theory and Visualization’, Environment and Planning. A 38, no. 11 (2006): 2021–37, https://doi.org/10.1068/a37327.
- Sasha Engelmann et al., ‘Open-Weather: Speculative-Feminist Propositions for Planetary Images in an Era of Climate Crisis’, Geoforum 137 (2022): 237–47.
- Marianna Pavlovskaya and Kevin St Martin, ‘Feminism and Geographic Information Systems: From a Missing Object to a Mapping Subject: Feminism and Geographic Information Systems’, Geography Compass 1, no. 3 (2007): 583–606, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00028.x; Gillian Rose, ‘“Everyone’s Cuddled up and It Just Looks Really Nice”: An Emotional Geography of Some Mums and Their Family Photos’, Social & Cultural Geography 5, no. 4 (2004): 549–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/1464936042000317695.
- Sarah Elwood and Agnieszka Leszczynski, ‘Feminist Digital Geographies’, Gender, Place & Culture 25, no. 5 (2018): 629–44, https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1465396; Agnieszka Leszczynski and Sarah Elwood, ‘Feminist Geographies of New Spatial Media’, Canadian Geographies / Géographies Canadiennes 59, no. 1 (2015): 12–28, https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12093; Monica Stephens, ‘Gender and the GeoWeb: Divisions in the Production of User-Generated Cartographic Information’, GeoJournal 78, no. 6 (2013): 981–96.
- Nadine Schuurman, ‘Women and Technology in Geography: A Cyborg Manifesto for GIS’, Canadian Geographer 46, no. 3 (2002): 261–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1541-0064.2002.tb00748.x.
[13/01/2025]
Helivision
For example L’Italia vista dal cielo (IT 1966–78)
In the post-war period (circa 1945–75), Europe faced enormous planning challenges: The reconstruction of primary infrastructures for supply, security and transport as well as city centres, institutions and neighbourhoods, further urban expansions through the planning and realisation of large housing estates and later New Towns to fight the often late-approached, worsening housing crisis were documented, at least in Western Europe, by the emerging state television. The new and visually powerful medium which found its way into people's living rooms in the postwar years, became a central authority for informing about planning activities, for promoting them as part of the propagated progress, but also for soon taking a critical look at them. Planning projects, including master plans and models, were presented and discussed by (always male) commentators, presenters and experts; new residential neighbourhoods, especially housing estates, were visited by reporters and residents (e.g. in France mostly women and children) were interviewed. In some cases, no expense was spared: aerial images taken by helicopter provided an informative overview as well as an abstract view from a distance.When it comes to the way of visually showing and therefore to camera work and framing, the special optics and visual regime that the aerial shots establish must be focused on: I summarise the combination of helicopter technology and flight (Boulet 1982, Boyne 2011, Carey 1986, Watkinson 2004), human eye and camera eye under the term ‘helivision’.
I understand ‘helivision’ in two ways and within two contexts of application: Within my research project, which focuses on post-war planning and how it was mediated, advertised and criticised through television by using vertical images (Adey 2013, Parks 2018, Sandoz/Weber 2022a/b,) and particularly helivision, I am primarily interested in (1) the field of civilian exploration and documentation. Here, helivision serves as a cinematographic dispositive that, through the combination of a steered helicopter and a human-operated camera in the flying object itself, creates a perceptual arrangement to explore the world from above, at different altitudes and thus in different relations to the ground level. In addition to case studies in the fields of architecture, urban planning and (infrastructure) landscape, the aim here is to explore the characteristic optics and gaze that helivision conveys in contrast to the (cartographic) aerial photographs usually taken from a higher distance from an aeroplane. In addition to the civilian use of helivision, there is (2) the military use: here, helivision is a system that enables prosthetic vision through the use of camera systems for aerial reconnaissance, surveillance and attack. Helivision therefore combines the human-operated helicopter – which, as a so-called rotorcraft that takes off and lands vertically, is characterised by speed, maneuverability and the ability to stand still in the air – with the controllable direction of the gaze that has long since led to iconic images in fictional films (for example the US anti-Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola from 1979), as well as with camera technologies that prosthetically extend the human gaze. The development, applications and dissemination of drone technologies and recordings of so-called ‘drone vision’ (Chamayou 2015, Green 2015, Pong/Richardson 2024, Serafinelli/O’Hagan 2024, Queisner 2016, Kleinschroth/Banda/Zimba/Dondeyne/Nyambe/ Spratley/Winton 2022) from flying objects can only be understood, as I would argue, if we understand the helivision that preceded it.
Showing Italy to the Italian people: L'Italia vista dal cielo (Folco Quilici, IT 1966–1978)
The following ambitious and extensive film project is not primarily related to the pragmatic context I have outlined before, which in terms of format often resulted in news reports or documentaries. Rather, this somehow large-scale film project aimed to capture an entire country from the air. In the mid-1960s, Esso Standard Italiana commissioned a film documentary series on an unprecedented scale: the filmmaker, author and pioneer of underwater filming Folco Quilici (see Ballardini 1985, Braudel/Bernagozzi, Calcagno/Quattrocchi 1992, Caputi 1999/2000, Quilici/Cantini 2002) and his team filmed all of Italy's regions from the air for L'Italia vista dal cielo (Teodosio 2006, Quilici 1980/1987, Quilici 2005). According to Quilici's own statements, he was relatively free in his choice of content for the multi-part and extremely elaborately produced film (Boselli/Quilici 1979/1980, 111–112). The result were 14 episodes, each presenting one or two Italian regions within the duration of about 35 to 65 minutes. The aerial shots are combined with scenes in the sense of a cultural-historical documentation: they present historical maps which were juxtaposed to the views from above, inhabitants, their crafts, their everyday life and their traditional celebrations, as well as views of urban and rural sceneries, historical and contemporary buildings, vernacular architecture, and works of art. For the shots from the helicopter the French camera system ‘Hélivision’ was used as it provided smooth shots without any vibration. The moving images were each accompanied by music and a voice over text. Quilici wrote the commentary texts together with famous (only male) writers, preferably from the respective region.
L'Italia vista dal cielo’s visual level focuses primarily on Italy's long history with buildings from antiquity to more recent times as well as unspoilt parts of the country and cultural landscapes. However, with an equal interest in the present day at the time, it also shows building projects from more recent times and comments on them in different ways: Notably, the first episode was dedicated to two southern regions and not to Lazio with the Roman capital and the head quarter of Esso italiana that had commissioned L’Italia vista dal cielo. Towards the end of Basilicata e Calabria the visual and textual level put a striking amount of hope in the newly built motorway (Fig. 1). According to the voice over, written by Quilici together with the writer and screenwriter Giuseppe Berto, this infrastructure of regional and national importance would connect the South, which had been isolated for thousands of years, to the rest of the country, especially the Autostrada del Sole A1 relating Milano via Bologna, Firenze and Roma with Napoli. The same tenor of hope and confidence is conveyed by numerous newspaper articles from a conspicuous number of different local newspapers on the first episode. The press wrote about L’Italia del cielo on the occasion of its screenings at industry and tourism film festivals as well as for illustrious and broad audiences in the regions themselves. The eleventh episode about Lazio, made in 1975 and thus towards the completion of the series, conveys a diametrically opposed attitude towards more recent buildings: The motorway infrastructures and the new districts rapidly built on the outskirts of Rome in the post-war period are harshly criticised in the voice over text (Fig. 2), this time written by Quilici together with the literary scholar and art historian Mario Praz.
Regions, municipalities, schools or Italian cultural centres and embassies could obtain the individual episodes and ultimately the entire film series free of charge from the Esso Cineteca in Rome, which also produced educational films for schools. L'Italia vista del cielo was presented in Esso magazines and also appeared in book publications. In June 1978, the Italian state television station RAI showed for the first time the entire series of L'Italia vista dal cielo. It was completed in the same year and thus after twelve years of production. The timing of the first broadcast shortly before the long summer holidays was obviously chosen with care: In the postwar years, Italians had become more mobile thanks to the affordability of cars. They were able to use the series L'Italia vista dal cielo to draw inspiration from the artistic and cultural treasures as well as the country and people of other regions for their holiday destination, reached by car via motorway and thanks to Esso petrol tank fill-ups. Quilici was fully aware of his client's intentions: Esso had already deformed entire landscapes in France, Great Britain and Germany, and then also in Italy, in particular through refineries. Quilici reports on around a dozen initiatives, including a prize for landscape painting, with which the Esso brand compensated for its destructive activities. Apparently, film projects had already been planned in France and Germany, but these were only realised in Italy, and with considerable international appeal. (Boselli/Quilici 1979/1980, 98)
Bibliography:
Adey, Peter, Whitehead, Mark, and Williams, Alison J. (eds.), From Above: War, Violence, and Verticality, Hurst, London 2013.
Alvisi, Giovanna, and Coppa, Mario, Fotografia aerea e storia urbanistica, Edigraf, Roma, 1979.
Asendorf, Christoph, Super Constellation, Flugzeug und Raumrevolution: die Wirkung der Luftfahrt auf Kunst und Kultur der Moderne, Springer, Wien/New York: Springer, 1997.
Ballardini, Bruno, Folco Quilici: un mestiere come avventura, Dedalo, Bari 1985.
Boselli, Laura, Folco Quillici [sic!] – dalle serie televisive al film: Indagine di un’esperienza cinematografica, Master Thesis, Università degli studi di Bologna, Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, Corso di Laurea in discipline delle arti, musica e spettacolo, Bologna 1979/1980.
Boulet, Jean, History of the Helicopter as Told by its Pioneers 1907–1956, Edition France-Empire, Paris 1982.
Boyne, Walter J., How the Helicopter Changed Modern Warfare, Pelican Pub. Co., Gretna 2011.
Caputi, Ilaria, Il cinema di Folco Quilici, Marsilio, Venezia 2000.
Caputi, Ilaria, Il cinema di Folco Quilici, un cinema per l'uomo e per l'ambiente, Casea, Bologna 1999.
Carey, Keith, The Helicopter: An Illustrated History, Stephens, Wellingborough 1986.
Chamayou, Grégoire, Drone Vision, Penguin Books, London 2015.
De Stefano, Mariella, Aspetti antropologici del cinema di Folco Quilici (^^m PhD Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", Roma 2002.
Didi-Huberman, Georges, ‘Penser penché’, in Vues d'en haut [exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou, Metz, 18.05.–07.10.2013], ed. by Angela Lampe, Centre Pompidou, Metz, 2013, pp. 196–205.
Dorrian, Mark, and Pousin, Frédéric (eds.), Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, I.B. Tauris, London, 2013.
Green, Daniel, ‘Drone Vision’, Surveillance & Society, 13/2 (July 2015), pp. 233–249.
Harley, J. B., ‘Maps, Knowledge, and Power’, in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. by Denis E. Cosgrove, and Daniels, Stephen, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988, pp. 277–312.
Haffner, Jeanne, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2013.
Henicz, Lisa, ‘Architectural Aerial Photography’, https://aerialspatialrevolution.ch/architectural-aerial-photography-lisa-henicz, 16.10.2024.
Kittler, Friedrich, Optische Medien, Berliner Vorlesung 1999, Merve-Verlag, Berlin 2001.
Kleinschroth, Fritz, Banda, Kawawa, Zimba, Henry, Dondeyne, Stefan, Nyambe, Imasiku, Spratley, Simon, and Winton, R. Scott, ‘Drone Imagery to Create a Common Understanding of Landscapes’, Landscape and Urban Planning, (Dec. 2022), s. p.
Kurgan, Laura, Close up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics, Zone Books, Brooklyn, 2013.
Lampe, Angela (ed.), Vues d'en haut [exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou, Metz, 18.05.–07.10.2013], Centre Pompidou, Metz 2013.
Mantero, Rosario, Il cinema etnografico di Folco Quilici, PhD Università degli Studi di Bologna, Bologna 2004.
Niemi, Robert, History in the Media: Film and Television, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, 2006.
Parks, Lisa, Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror, Routledge, New York 2018.
Pong, Beryl, and Richardson, Michael, Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, Open Humanities Press, London 2024.
Queisner, Moritz, ’Drone Vision: Sehen und Handeln an der Schnittstelle von Sinnen und Sensoren’, in senseAbility: Mediale Praktiken des Sehens und Hörens, ed. by Beate Ochsner, and Robert Stock, 169–188, transcript, Bielefeld 2016, pp. 169–188.
Quilici, Folco, and Cantini, Lorenzo, L'Italia vista dal cielo, 1966–1984, Dai film a dai libri della Esso Italiana, Esso italiana, Milano 2002.
Quilici, Folco, Dal cielo, l’Italia, Fabbri, Milano 1987.
Quilici, Folco, Italia dal cielo, Viaggio per immagini nella storia, Donato, Bari, 1980.
Serafinelli, Elisa, and Lauren Alex O’Hagan (May 2024), ‘Drone Views: a Multimodel Ethnographic Perspective’ Visual Communication 23(2), pp. 223–243.
Teodosio, Annarita, ‘Cities from the Sky: Aerial Photography in Select 20th-Century Italian Experiences’ Paper Cities, Urban Portraits in Photographic Books, ed. by Susana S. Martins, and Anne Reverseau, Leuven University Press, Leuven 2016, pp. 113–130.
Virilio, Paul, War and Cinema. The Logistics of Perception [Guerre et Cinéma, Logistique de la Perception. Paris, 1984], Verso Books, London/New York 2009.
Watkinson, John, Art of the Helicopter, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford 2004.
Weber, Anne-Katrin (ed.), Dronetv.lu, 2020.
Weber, Anne-Katrin, and Marie Sandoz, Transbordeur, Photographie, histoire, société [L'image verticale. Politiques de la vue aérienne], 6 (2022).
Weber, Anne-Katrin, and Marie Sandoz, ‘Introduction, Pour une histoire matérielle et intermédiatique de l'image verticale’ Transbordeur, Photographie, histoire, société [L'image verticale. Politiques de la vue aérienne], 6 (2022), pp. 6–12.
[16/01/2025]
Telearchics
“No picture of the development of man’s conquest of the air would be complete without reference to telearchics – the remote control of mechanism by radio” (Hershey, 1943): with these words, the American geographer describes what is destined to become a mechanism for remote space dominance through an unmanned aerial vehicle, controlled from unimaginable distances and capable of reaching uninhabitable places for humans.
The vast stage for testing this new technological frontier, which would subsequently revolutionize air power, is the operation crossroad at Bikini Atoll in June 1946. This Operation is disruptive in its exceptionality because it reveals that the drone is the only aerial vehicle capable of surviving an atomic blast and photographically documenting the event while collecting scientific data on air and radioactivity. Crossroad inaugurated a dynamic that continues to influence political and military strategies up to modern wars, exploiting distance through telechiric systems or unmanned telechiric machines that are “technology of manipulation at a distance” (Clark, 1964), as well as technical assemblages that serve as perceptual and exploratory substitutes for humans in inhospitable environments. Telechiric systems reshape how we think, interpret, measure, and strategically organize spatial topography from afar (Chamayou, 2015).
The aerial photograph of the atomic cloud taken during the tests at Bikini by an unmanned aerial vehicle at the exact moment of detonation, visible in real-time to the drone operator, possesses an unsettling beauty and a newborn wonder that only an impossible perspective to the human eye can evoke.
It's no coincidence that unmanned systems and the idea of telearchics reached their peak of success and development concurrently with the discovery of nuclear energy and gases, which give rise to models of atmopower and atmoterrorism (Sloterdijk, 2009). With the atmoterrorist model, the primary functions of human life have been attacked and humanity's survival on Earth has been called into question, making it potentially uninhabitable. But it is precisely from the danger of the uninhabitability of certain places that the idea of building a telechiric device that would creep into dangerous and inaccessible places to Man, enacting remote colonization and domination through the gaze of the unmanned aerial system's camera and remote-radio control through the discovery of radio waves and electromagnetic waves.
“For this reason, drone technology can be considered a sort of absolute metaphor of contemporary entortung (dis-placement)” (Vegetti, 2017), capable of inaugurating a phenomenology of impossible and uninhabitable places, or rather, of places that cannot be experienced by human perception, except through a technological mediation that combines two fundamental dimensions of human phenomenological experience: the visual and the haptic-tactile. This is contingent upon two instruments that possess the capacity to fundamentally transform telecommunications through the ether, specifically radio and television (Chandler, 2020; Hershey, 1943; Weber, 2019).
“Telearchics – the remote control by radio of unmanned mechanism – may have some strartling advertisement before the war ends. Like all other devices, this is simply one application of the new science of electronics, child of radio and parent of television. Robot planes, guided by telearchic control, and containing television cameras, can be sent over enemy positions and flashback a running picture” (Hershey, 1944).
Dislocation is made possible not only by the conquest of the air element or the atmospheric element but also of a quintessence, which Aristotle referred to as the fifth element, different from Earth, Fire, and Water but especially distinct from Air: ether.
“Διόπερ ὡς ἑτέρου τινὸς ὄντος τοῦ πρώτου σώματος παρά γῆν καὶ πῦρ καὶ ἀέρα καὶ ὕδωρ, αἰθέρα προσωνομάσαν τὸν ἀνωτάτον τόπον, ἀπὸ τοῦ θεῖν ἀεί τὸν αἰώνιον χρόνον θεμενοῦντες τὴν ἐπωνυμίαν αὐτῷ” ("Therefore, considering the first body as something different from earth, fire, air, and water, they called it aether, the highest place, deriving the name they gave it from the fact that it moves always, for the eternity of time.") (Aristotels, 350 B.C.)
A universal medium that fills space and through which everything propagates, the ether promises immaterial spaces of power that take advantage of the fifth element as the highest and noblest, capable of occupying all spaces of existence in which electromagnetic phenomena propagate, ensuring invisibility, intangibility and ubiquity. “The conquest of the ether did not merely create new technologies ancillary to war: it has constantly transformed the character and pace of operations, and also created a new theatre of war as rival users sought to jam opponent’s transmissions, eavesdrop on communications and practice deception” (Hirst, 2005). Power is everywhere and takes advantages of the domination of distance: for this reason we find ourselves faced with the deconstruction of place and the deterritorialization of the centers of power (Vegetti, 2009) where a definitive spatial unprooting of the theater of war (Schmitt, 1950) is accomplished through air warfare and wave warfare.
If we look at the operations that inaugurated the era of remote dominance, starting from Crossroad, up to the video presented here of the Weary Willy Operation, to the even more famous Operation Aphrodite, or finally Operation Remote - all operations concentrated between 1943 and 1946 - and compare them with the current wars fought with FPV drones, nothing has changed in substance. These are undoubtedly long-term logics that have given rise to a revolutionary strategic and spatial awareness. At Bikini Atoll, the visual remote control of the atomic perspective was ensured by two cameras: one mounted on the nose of the drone and another inside the cockpit, oriented in such a way that it focused on the instrument control panel, while the human pilot was positioned on the ground, tens of kilometers away from the event they were visually and perceptively witnessing, or on a mother aircraft where they controlled drone fleets through an immersive viewing station, a precursor to the current and more innovative technology of the headsets used by First Person View drone pilots.
And this has been the case since Crossroad onwards, through the postmodern wars inaugurated by the Gulf War and continuing with the GWOT, and finally in the war between Russia and Ukraine, where "The military environment is no longer so much a geophysical one of the real space of battles (terrestrial, maritime, aerial, etc.) as a microphysical one of the real-time electromagnetic environment of real-time engagement" (Virilio, 2005). Telearchics thus enables the expansion of space and territory, which is no longer, as Virilio argued, the geographical and physical one, but the ionospheric one of the ether, in which forms of surveillance, power, death, and colonization pass.
All translations from Italian by the author (LP)
Cited works:
Aristotles, (350 B.C.), De caelo, fragment 270b 16-22 in “Il cielo”, edited by Jori, A. (2002).
Chamayou, G. (2015). Drone theory. Penguin UK
Chandler, K. (2020). Unmanning: How humans, machines and media perform drone warfare. Rutgers University Press.
Clark, J. W. (1964). Remote control in hostile environments. New Scientist, 22(389), 300-304.
Hershey, B., & Peterson, H. (1944). Skyways of tomorrow.
Hershey, B. (1943). The Air Future: A Primer of Aeropolitics.
Hirst, P. (2005). Space and power: politics, war and architecture. Polity.
Schmitt, C. (2003). The nomos of the earth (Vol. 1950). New York: Telos Press.
Sloterdijk, P., Patton, A., & Corcoran, S. (2009). Terror from the Air.
Vegetti, M. (Ed.). (2013). Filosofie della metropoli: spazio, potere, architettura nel pensiero del Novecento. Carocci.
Vegetti, M. (2017). L'invenzione del globo. Giulio Einaudi Editore.
Virilio, P. (2005). Desert screen: War at the speed of light. A&C Black.
Weber, A. K. (2019). “L’œil électrique” et “la torpille volante” : pistes pour une histoire du drone à partir de l’histoire télévisuelle. A contrario, (2), 81-98.