About

Lisa Henicz

USI/OST

[16/10/2024]

[image1] Aerial Photograph from the Hirslanden clinic. 1932, Walter Mittelholzer.

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.

[image 2] State of the art x-ray machine at the clinic. 1932, unknown.

[image 3] Control room for the x-ray machine. 1932, unknown.

The Hirslanden clinic, named after its location in Zurich, was designed by Hermann Weideli, and constructed as well as mostly financed by Heinrich and Marie Hatt-Haller. In 1932, the hospital opened its doors to patients, who were to be treated under the most modern standards in the “best-equipped hospital of contemporary Europe”. ([s. n.] 1932, 29) A few weeks after the opening in May 1932, Walter Mittelholzer went on a “Photo flight”, as he noted in his diary, for “roughly 15 minutes in the evening with arch. Weideli for the hospital Neumünster”. (Agenda 1932, fond VA, signature 38247, Verkehrshaus der Schweiz, Luzern) The first published image the flight resulted in was printed as early as July 2nd in the Schweizerische Bauzeitung as part of an article on the innovative architectural project (see image 1). Apart from the hospital’s location in a large park and the importance of air and light in all patient rooms the article mostly focuses on the technological advantages the new building offers. Published in two parts, the second consists mostly of the detailed technical descriptions of the x-ray machine “the largest not only in Switzerland but generally”, the aseptic installations, and the soundproofing of pipes, elevators and all doors. ([s.n.] 1932, 22) The latter were equipped with felt inlays that mechanically pressed down when the doors were shut, avoiding the installation of thresholds and, thus, any obstacles in the path of the patients’ beds. Mittelholzer’s aerial photograph is shown together with an exterior view and an aerial plan at the beginning of the article. It is one of only four external pictures, while most of the forty images show the rooms with their technologically advanced instruments (see image 2 + 3). The aerial photograph taken from the north only shows the clinic, the street and its park but no neighboring buildings. The shadows are long and the camera facing facades well-lit in the evening sun. A truck is turning from the street onto the driveway leading to the delivery entrance.

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.

Emanuel Tandler

UNIFR

[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

I. «Astronoetics»: An invention in & out of its time

On October 4th 1957, the first artificial ‘satellite’ – after Kepler (1611) lat. satelles or russ. sputnik for a ‘celestial body accompanying a planet’ – was launched by the Soviet Union into a lower elliptical orbit around the earth. Two days later, the American news program CBS News Special began with 18 seconds of the recorded beep signal that Sputnik 1 – with its iconic radio antennas mounted on the spherical aluminium body (Fig.1) – sent to earth. “Until two days ago”, the anchor Douglas Edwards proclaimed after this special opening jingle, “that sound had never been heard on this Earth. Suddenly, it has become as much part of 20th century life as the whirr of your vacuum cleaner.”⁰²

Fig. 1: "WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES" in: LIFE-Magazine (21.10.1957, p.24).

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

Fig. 2: "WE ARE SERIOUS, BUT WITH SMILES". In: LIFE-magazine (21.10.1957, p.25).

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

II. Thinking as astronoeticians

In the midst of these battles and agitations, Blumenberg places his “wavering figure of astronoetics” in the form and style of a cheerful and polemical gloss: “Between pastoral idyll, protective pathos and the bare armouring of precise knowledge, the position of this wavering figure of astronoetics asserts or loses itself.”¹⁴ The “in-between” is decisive here and is anything but an unstable, fluctuating post-modern preposition, but rather the art of ‘noetics’ that neither falls into the gap of the supposedly precise separation of humanities and natural science like Charles P. Snow's The Two Cultures And The Scientific Revolution (1959) claimed, nor falls prey to the political or pastoral birth of a pathos of security or a humanity as an idyllic “flock of sheep”: “Our increase in knowledge and ability has had only a disproportionately small influence on our thinking: this applies not only to the weighing up of “technological assessments”, it also applies to the assessment of knowledge, which seems to have to do with more harmless things. But also does have to do with such?»¹⁵ Blumenberg “does” this by using Edmund Husserl's understanding of ‘noetics’ to subject the pros and cons of the respective harmless, metaphysical or scientific “consciousness of reason to an intuitive phenomenological investigation”.¹⁶ In doing so, he does not depart from his time, but rather simulates, scrutinises and explores its increase in knowledge with an eye for its lifeworld: Blumenberg thus succeeds, for example, in reflecting on current ‘considerations of the consequences of technology’ with a comparative leap into another time: “In 1781, William Herschel discovered Uranus. For the first time since antiquity, indeed since the astronomy of the Babylonians, the number of visible planets had been increased by a telescopic one – an almost blasphemous discovery of the first order against the canonical world order. One could again expect something from the heavens.”¹⁷ However, in the gesture of the question posed in the title’s gloss, Blumenberg immediately inserts a critical ‘assessment’ of or for the lifeworld: More planets or less pain? And the gloss continues the story, when Herschel’s Uranus news also reached the Göttingen observatory and the astronomer and writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whom Blumenberg himself described as an ‘astronoetician avant la lettre’. He then quotes the following entry of Lichtenberg’s Sudelheft: “To invent an infallible remedy for toothache, which would relieve it in an instant, would probably be worth as much, and more, than discovering another planet.”¹⁸ What is shown anecdotally in nuce is an astronoetician’s pensiveness about how to proceed with “technology-assessment” through a historical step-aside-perspective: “What we call reason must be able to prove itself as a reversibility of perspective, as detachable from the contingent conditions of the starting point that we hold.”¹⁹ It is important to note that this kind of astronoetic reasoning is phenomenological, intuitive, historical, anecdotal and specially glossatorically free in opening unusual perspectives. Nevertheless, it also proceeds methodically and systematically. This is already signalled in the book’s title, which is not dedicated to the ‘infinity’ of the stars, but to their ‘completeness’. However, this method and systematic approach is not immediately recogniseable when you consider that the reader only comes across the title What is astronoetics? in the very last gloss and pages of the book. Therefore, three reading spectacles alongside examples will be provided in the following paragraph to sharpen astronoetic curiosity and support the lexical endeavor.

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.

Fig. 3: "SPACESHIP EARTH”- Epcot-Park (Florida). In: Sarasota Herlad-Tribune (1982).

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.”²⁵On 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). ( Husserl's unmoving and flying ark). Although the earth can be understood metaphorically as a ship and since Copernicus and Galileo, theoretically and telescopically as a moving body, for our consciousness and our intuition of movement and orientation, the general rotation of the earth remains an “ark”, that does not move: “The earth itself in its original conceptual form does not move and does not rest; only in relation to it do rest and movement have meaning.”²⁷ The sense of orientation therefore only comes into play when we perceive the earth as a necessarily motionless ‘ground’. Using Husserl’s second dominant metaphor of the ‘horizon’, this means: “I can always continue to walk on my ground and experience its physical being in a certain way ever more fully; it has its horizon in the fact that I can walk on it and experience more and more of it and everything that is on it.”²⁸ In simple words: We experience the earth as ground and not as a rotating celestial body, and we explore it at every turn with a view towards a horizon. In Blumenberg’s words: “All of man's adventures around the world presuppose that he can stand on a piece of solid ground again and again at some point.”²⁹ From this common fixed point, Blumenberg's astronoetics can be interpreted on the one hand as an adaptation of Husserl's geocentric-cosmological phenomenology, and on the other hand as their further development with new reference points as set by The Space Race in the 20th century. “One can say,” as Alberto Fragio Gistau describes Husserl's life-world phenomenology through Blumenberg's cosmological lense, “that the first man on the moon and the accompanying change in the ground of experience was not just a small step for man, but a giant leap for the phenomenology of the lifeworld.”³⁰ The moon landing was an effective crossing of the terrestrial ‘lifeworld-threshold’, and not a telescopic one: “However, it was one thing to observe the moon through a telescope and quite another to walk on its surface. The central question now revolved around the historical transformation of the terrestrial lifeworld of the contemplator caeli into the lunar lifeworld of the astronaut, which involved not only a factual expansion or extension of the human lifeworld, but a real transfiguration of the sense of the earth».³¹ Although Blumenberg often commented sarcastically on astronautical journeys to the stars because of their disproportion between travelling time and living time, between physical exertion and gaining knowledge, his art and the leitmotif of astronoetics consists in making visible the lines of conflict between the familiar horizon of lifeworld-experience and the new view of the Earth on the lunar horizon; in order to gain the advantages and disadvantages for the former – as an assessment for the lifeworld – in a astronoetic way.

III. Astronoetics in the future

In short, one could conclude that Blumenberg's astronoetics has left us a cosmological phenomenology of the lifeworld of and for the 21st century. The Completeness of the Stars is a treasure trove of glosses that establish points of view that need to be scrutinized and rewritten for current and future, horizontal and vertical points of references and perspectives.

Fig. 4: Cambodia-Landsat-image from 1995 and 2009 before & after the floods.

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).

Fig. 5: Image generated by Daniel Falb using DALL-E with the prompt “A number of radically different Earths that have succeeded each other in time.” (25 Sept. 2024)

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.

Lisa Henicz

USI/OST

[26/05/2025]

[Image 1] Aerial Photograph of the Perle-du-Lac, Walter Mittelholzer, around 1926. Programme and Rules for the Architectural Competition for the Erection of a League of Nations Building at Geneva, UN Archives.

Bird’s-Eye View

In Architecture Competitions

The bird’s-eye view is a visualizing technique, where things are depicted from above as if seen from a flying bird. While it has been an imaginative perspective in the visual arts for millennia, since the late 19th century the human conquest of the air and the invention of photography accomplished the factual depiction of the world from above. The following contribution will focus on bird’s-eye views in the field of architecture, and more specifically on its use in architecture competitions in the early 20th century.

Competitions are a common method to receive a variety of solutions for an architectural problem, with a jury of experts choosing the best option to be realized. The program of a competition along with planning documents are procured by its jury and explains the project's requirements and particularities to the participants. Today, the list of drawings that are to be furnished often includes aerial perspectives. However, when bird’s-eye views were first introduced to competitions in the late 19th century, their benefits were discussed controversially. While some feared that a skilled visualizer could blind the jury and the overall quality of entries would diminish, others saw the potential in aerial perspectives to communicate complex situations three-dimensionally to both experts and laymen (Rasch 2022). Thus, when aerial photography became more common after WWI, the architectural profession had not gotten entirely used to the idea of the aerial perspective in competitions, yet. However, a development can be traced throughout the first half of the century. The city of Zurich purchased aerial photographs as early as 1916 for the use in urban competitions (Stadler 2010, 12) and the German geodesist and urbanist Alfred Abendroth announced in 1929 that oblique aerial photographs rendered a site visit obsolete altogether (Abendroth 1929, 205). In this context, the 1926 competition for the Palais des Nations (PdN) in Geneva paradigmatically demonstrates the status quo of the aerial moment in architectural competitions during the interwar period.

[Image 2] Bird’s-eye view by Hendrickx and De Ligne, 1927. League of Nations 1927a.

[Image 3] Bird’s-eye view by Vago, 1927. League of Nations 1927a.

Founded after WWI, the League of Nations’ main goal was to maintain global peace through diplomatic work. In 1926, a competition was launched to build the League’s headquarters in Geneva, which charged the discipline of architecture with the huge responsibility of designing a space that symbolized and actively fostered intercultural understanding and peace. The international jury consisted of nine renowned architects, who in seventeen months drafted, iterated, and finally distributed the program for the competition (Letter from Karl to Werner Moser, 31.01.1925, gta Archiv.) The protocols of the jury meetings document the cautious tender of the program (Jury international d’architectes. Procès-verbal de la deuxième session, UN Archives). It is a significant testimony to the growing importance of the celestial perspective that aerial photographs were included in the annex and a bird’s-eye view was listed as one of the required drawings. This becomes particularly apparent in comparison to the competition for the Bureau International du Travail (BIT) held three years prior on the neighboring site, which, even though significantly smaller, served as a reference for the competition in 1926. The BIT’s competition brief included romantic landscape photos by the local photographer Frédéric Boissonnas. This inspired his recommission for the PdN, where his images were supplemented by the works of Zurich-based aerial photographer Walter Mittelholzer (see image 1; Programme and Rules for the Architectural Competition for the Erection of a League of Nations Building at Geneva, UN Archives).

Furthermore, the requirement that one of the two furnished perspectives had to be aerial obliged all competing architects to engage with their projects from above. The analysis of the entered aerial perspectives shows a strong influence of Mittelholzer’s photographs on the contestants’ visualisations. Of the 377 entries, roughly 120 are documented in archives or contemporary articles, and hardly any are complete (League of Nations 1927a; 1927b; Martin 1929; Meyenburg 1927; Piacentini 1928). While some of the low-angle bird’s-eye views appear to be depicting the axially centered building from a nearby hill, drawing from a traditional iconography of baroque palaces (see image 3), most of the perspectives are significantly steeper and incite a feeling of movement and accidentality, mimicking Mittelholzer’s photographs (see image 2). Focusing on the Perle-du-lac, the buildings are off-centered and slanted. One intriguing characteristic of aerial photography, according to competitor Hans Bernoulli, is the shift of the horizon beyond our usual gaze (Bernoulli 1921, 87). In fact, most of the aerial perspectives show no horizon. This new perspective fascinated the observer as it stimulated a sensation of vertigo.

The competition for the PdN is an extraordinary example of the implementation of a new medium in both the architectural design and theory. It acted as a catalyst for aerial photography’s debut in the international architectural discourse and inspired experimental methodologies among the contestants. It marks a turning point in the history of visualizing architectural projects, with traditional approaches on one hand and, on the other, compositions heavily influenced by the innovative and most promising mode of intercultural understanding: the airplane. Therefore, the implementation of aerial photography in the architectural competition for the PdN epitomizes the League of Nation’s ambitions for global understanding. Or, to put it in Mittelholzer’s words:

"Just as the railway generated a new worldview, aviation will alter ours. Even if today‘s peoples isolate themselves in narrow national egoism, the time will come when aeronautics will shatter this artificial situation".

(Unpublished Manuscript, Walter Mittelholzer, Verkehrshaus Luzern)

All translations by author.

Cited Works:

Abendroth, Alfred. 1929. “Städtebau Und Luftbild.” Edited by Werner Hegemann. Städtebau. Begründet von 1904 von Camillo Sitte, no. 24, 201–6.

Bernoulli, Hans. 1921. “Aero-Photos.” Das Werk. Architektur Und Kunst 8 (4). https://www.e-periodica.ch//digbib/volumes?UID=wbw-002.

League of Nations. 1927a. Concours d’architecture. Pour l’édification d’un Palais de La Société Des Nations, à Genève = Architectural Competition. For the Erection of a League of Nations Building at Geneva. Genève: Société d’Editions.

———. 1927b. Projects Soumis Au Concours d’architecture: [Pour l’édification d’un Palais de La Société Des Nations à Genève], 1927. Designs Submitted in the Architectural Competition [for the Erection of a League of Nations Building at Geneva], 1927. Genève?

Martin, Camille. 1929. “Le Palais de La S.D.N.” Text/html,application/pdf,text/html. Das Werk. Architektur Und Kunst 16 (3). https://doi.org/10.5169/SEALS-15919.

Meyenburg, K. von. 1927. “Le concours pour l’édification d’un palais de la société des nations à Genève.” Text/html,application/pdf,text/html. Das Werk. Architektur und Kunst 14 (7). https://doi.org/10.5169/SEALS-86293.

Piacentini, Marcello. 1928. “Problemi Reali Più Che Razionalismo Preconcetto.” Architettura e Arti Decorative 8 (1): 103–13.

Rasch, Marco. 2022. “The Influence of the Photographic Birds-Eye View on German Urbanism.” In Aerial Spatial Revolution in Architecture and Urbanism – Online-Symposium. Mendrisio. https://aerialspatialrevolution.ch.

Stadler, Hilar, ed. 2010. Eduard Spelterini Und Das Spektakel Der Bilder. Die Kolorierten Lichtbilder Des Ballonpioniers = Eduard Spelterini and the Spectacle of Images. The Colored Slides of the Pioneer Balloonist. Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess.

Cited Archives:

gta Archiv: Letter from Karl to Werner Moser, 31.01.1925, 4-K-8-1925-01-31.

Library and Archives of the United Nations Geneva: Construction d’une salle des assemblees Jury international d’architectes. Procès-verbal de la deuxième session, Janvier 1926, R1541-32-49424-28594.

–––. Programme and Rules for the Architectural Competition for the Erection of a League of Nations Building at Geneva, COL37bis-16-2.

Verkehrshaus der Schweiz Luzern: Unpublished Manuscript, Walter Mittelholzer, VA-48259 II Diverse Texte.

Tommaso Morawski

SUPSI

[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.

The Blue Marble, Apollo 17, 7 December 1972

Earthrise and The Blue Marble are two symbols of our time, two icons of the cosmonautical enterprise that have been instrumental in the creation of a complex planetary visual grammar and the sanctioning of the birth of a new landscape consciousness of the cosmos. Yet today they are so natural and obvious that the operations and discourses that produced them and inscribed them in the Western collective imagination have become transparent and invisible. Tracing their genesis is a way of interrogating the operation of “landscaping” (Mitchell 1994) out of which the new astronautical worldview was born: that ‘altered image of the Earth’ (Cosgrove 2001, p. 257) which is the most important and enduring legacy of the ‘astronautical spatial revolution’, the last great global spatial revolution in the air age (Vegetti 2022). As Steward Brand, the founder of one of the most significant magazines of the American counterculture, The Whole Earth Catalogue, renowned for initiating the campaign Why Haven't We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?, summarizes: “The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior – the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space” (Brand 2008).

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.

Emanuel Tandler

UNIFR

[28/10/2025]

Falling Upwards

A Cognitive Metaphor Between Gravity And Levitation

Figure 1. Trajectory and positions of the space station's orbit within 24 hours © Samantha Harvey 2023

I. Orientation in Orbit

In her latest Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital (2024), Samantha Harvey begins with a cosmonautical map. It provides the reader orientation and navigation. But not immediately: Only when we read the first few pages we gradually begin to understand what the map’s caption “24 Hours of Earth Orbits with Daylight in the Northern Hemisphere” actually means as we flip back and forth between pages and map.

Orbital takes us on an ecstatic 24-hour odyssey on a Tuesday morning in early October with an imaginary crew on an international Space Station. For a single day we accompany four astronauts and two cosmonauts (from America, Italy, UK, Japan and Russia) as they orbit the Earth at an altitude of around 400 km and at a speed of over 28,000 km/h. The series of numbers from 1 to 16 mapped on both hemispheres becomes much clearer as we realize that ‘a single day up here’ is something completely different than ‘down there’: A baffling arithmetic of thrust, attitude, speed and sensors.

And so it is, but in this new day they’ll circle the earth sixteen times. They’ll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights. (…) And so it is. But it’s a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wildernesses and warzones. In their rotations around the earth in accumulations of light and dark in the baffling arithmetic of thrust and attitude and speed and sensors, the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes. (Harvey 2024, 5).

Space travel obviously shreds time – whether it is zone-, standard-, seasonal-, night- or day and even astronomical time – into pieces. 24 hours means sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets every ninety minutes. But what about the space itself or as Harvey puts it what about a day of five continents, glaciers and deserts, wilderness and warzones? Grasping "the world" not with a singular place within an individual presence, opens up instead for the ISS-space-crew and Harvey’s reading fellows rather the chance to remote sensing and reading "the earth" in a wide spectrum of contrasting landscapes and culture zones in real-time. As a countermeasure, Harvey’s space crew insists: It’s 24 hours; and ground crews keep telling them so, but it takes their 24 hours and throws sixteen days and nights at them in return. They cling to their 24-hour-clock because it’s all their feeble little timebound body knows – sleep and bowels and all that is leashed to it. But as Harvey reminds us their mind goes free within the first week: “The mind is in a dayless freak zone, surfing earth’s hurtling horizon” (ibid. 13).

II. Paul Virilio’s Open Sky

In his introduction of the essay Open Sky Paul Virilio leads us to this fundamental ‘hurtling’ change not only of time and perception but furthermore of space and perception. The central idea of his dromology to which these introductory lines refer is that modern technologies of speed and real-time transmission are fundamentally changing our traditional perspectives and orientation. Virilio highlights two specific events that also mark decisive breakaways and liftoffs for our SNF-project Aerial Spatial Revolution:

The breakaway of the Wright brothers on their first take-off from the beach at Kitty Hawk or, perhaps, the liftoff of the Apollo 11 mission at Cape Canaveral, show us another way, an exotic reorganization of sight that would finally take account of a possible fall upwards brought on by the recent acquisition of the speed of liberation from gravity: orbital speed at 28,000 kilometres per hour. (Virilio 1997, 2)

Instead of falling into the trap of a simplistic, technical and selectively heroic narrative of progress, Virilio understands history as an intertwining competition between traditional and new ways of seeing and orienting in time and space. Like Martin Jay he thinks perception and technologies in a more overlapping and ‘exotic reorganized’ way within a contested terrain of “scopic regimes” (Jay 1988, 4). In reference to Victor Hugo’s lines – The rope doesn't hang, the Earth pulls – he first of all begins with a blind spot of of a prior revolution, namely the revolution of perspective during the Italian Renaissance.

The original reference point for sight is therefore not what the Italian masters said it was, that of vanishing lines converging on the horizon, but one bound up with the delicate balancing act of a universal attraction which imposes on us its gearing towards the centre of the Earth, at the risk of our falling. (ibid. 3)

So Viriilo trusts again not simply in a single history of the Quattrocento perspectives and its episode of struggle and battle of geometers and painting masters vying to make us forget the 'high' and the 'low' by pushing the 'near' and the 'far' into a vanishing-point that literally fascinated them. Virilio instead adjusts and highlights phenomenologically that our vision is actually determined by our weight and oriented more vertically by the pull of earth’s gravity: the classic distinction between zenith and nadir.

III. A Challenging New Orientational Metaphor: “Falling Upwards”

This physical orientation is also manifested in Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphors in their seminal work Metaphors We Live By (1980). For them, not only our concepts, our thinking, and our language are fundamentally structured metaphorically, but metaphors are themselves anchored deeply in physical experience. We experience “up” and “down” through our bodies—through gravity, balance, movement, and spatial orientation. When we stand upright, we are alert, active, and alive. When we fall or lie down, we lose our orientation and ability to act. Therefore, our vertical body orientation shapes significantly our assessment of the Up and Down: ‘Up’ is associated with stability, health, control, life. Vice versa: ‘Down’ comes with powerlessness, illness and death. In chapter 4 four on orientational metaphors, they also make it clear: Thinking has a physical basis; ergo, it is embodied (Lakoff/Johnson 2003, 21ff.). However, this physical basis is turned upside down by the new chance of escape velocity and the new time and space dimensions in outer space. After this excursion into cognitive-linguistic and conceptual metaphor theory, it is clear that this is not only about the body, but also about language and cognition, or rather: Metaphors. Can we now logically derive an inverse metaphor for floating in outer space? As Virilio further points out, in times of aerial conquest and air pollution there is not only the ozone hole through which all UV radiation penetrates unfiltered, but also another hole above us where “a secret perspective is, in fact, hidden on high” (ibid. 2). A perspective that is actually challenging the traditional Open Sky, the zenith as a fixed point in a blue-coloured Azure and – as we know now – the bodily and metaphorical grid of orientation. And this is where not only Virilio's real-time-critique comes into play, but also his accurate metaphor of “falling upwards”, which brings us back to the question of outer space, since not only velocity is escaping, but also the sky is vanishing:

Preoccupied as we are, at the end of the millennium, with developing the absolute speed of our modern real-time transmission tools, we too often forget the importance of this other limit-speed, the one which has enabled us to escape the real space of our planet and so to 'fall upwards'. (ibid. 2)

Once again, it’s a fictional piece of art that allows us to visualize and understand in an iconic way Virilio’s notion of the “fall upwards”: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (UK 1968) has provided us one of the most frequently noted transitions in film history, the match cut that takes viewers from “The Dawn of Man” - as the film’s first sequence is titled - to the year 2001. That cut matches a bone cast into the air by a shrieking hominid to a space station, similarly thrust into space by modern humans dominating the following sequences.

Figure 2. Two match-cut still images from the falling bone to the floating spaceship in: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – exhibited in the Design Museum: Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, London 2019.

IV. The Serious Irony of Gravity

Tossed bones, of course, inevitably fall back down to Earth, thanks to the law of gravity. Good science simply anticipates that something thrown into the sky will eventually arc downward. Yet that hominid’s exuberant effort to defy gravity, an effort celebrated by the images of satellites and other space probes that we then glimpse as Kubrick’s narrative bursts through the boundaries of the past and moves to the year 2001. ”It is a wonderfully ironic piece of editing”, as film scholar Jay P. Telotte aptly remarks when he considers all layers of Kubrick's match cut: Pointing out that despite all our technological advances – evidenced by the complexity of the scientifically accurate model of the space station and other satellites we see – “we nevertheless have fundamentally progressed very little” although we are listening simultaneously to the classic strains of a Strauss waltz. Referring to Virilio, he critically adds: “We continue to fling our bits of technology into the air, higher and faster, of course, but with a similar sort of exultation, of self-conscious pride, as we strive to overcome one of the fundamental laws that weighs us down, governs human life, and constrains our ambitions: Gravity” (Telotte 2006, 43). Consequently, this type of irony implies that a scientifically self-heroic attempt to make technology higher and faster may, even under these extreme circumstances of outer space, remain a monkey-like gesture. Even if weightlessness is celebrated with Johann Strauss's melodious pompousness in The Blue Danube (1866), Kubrick's irony carries a “gravitational weight” and continues to echo Virilio's concerns. Gravity then becomes and stays more than a scientific revolution left-over, context and law: Gravity continues – not only physically as microgravity – to have a relatively strong effect and opens up a greater gravitas in the sense of “seriousness” of human life beyond the heroic self-glorification. In the following, we will demonstrate phenomenologically how the cognitive and orientational inversed metaphor of “falling upwards” matches not only the ambivalence and balance between gravity and levitation linguistically, but connects the serious impact - possibilities and restrictions - that space travel implies physically, scientifically, technically, perceptually and, as we will emphasize finally, above all emotionally.

Let’s first consider the physical-bodily risk of muscle atrophy in the space station – depicted accurately in Samantha Harvey’s thoroughly researched novel Orbital:

Up here in microgravity you’re a seabird on a warm day drifting, just drifting. What use are biceps, calves, strong shin bones; what use muscle mass? Legs are a thing of the past. But every day the six of them have to fight this urge to dissipate. They retreat inside their headphones and press weights and cycle nowhere at twenty-three times the speed of sound on a bike that has no seat or handlebars, just a set of pedals attached to a rig, and run eight miles inside a slick metal module with a close-up view of a turning planet. (Harvey 2024, 11.)

Legs seem to be a thing of the past in an imaginative seabird’s eye view. But what does sport mean as a daily routine under the conditions of falling upwards? Without constant training before and especially during their space-travel, the astronauts would hardly be able to get up from their chairs upon their return. Although cycling inside a slick metal at an increased speed of sound feels like travelling heroically nowhere, the “past body” obviously doesn’t dissipate in microgravity. It’s already a ‘pre-call’ by gravity.

Figure 3. ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet demonstrates what daily training on the space station looks like. © ESA / NASA / Screenshot from the ISS fitness-program-video (2017).

V. The Body as Scientific Experiment

Harvey's description seems to strike at the heart of Virilio's concern that the real possibility of falling upwards not only turns the essence of human orientation upside down when the territorial body with his four limbs is maneuvered into the extremely restrictive, high-tech wired infrastructure of the spacecraft. (see fig.3). Rather, it also fundamentally changes the biological body: This is what biomedical scientist and space physiologist Peter Norsk and his team are investigating when they measure the “fluid shift” of the ISS crew (Norsk et al. 2015). As a brief description: Fluid shift is the movement of body fluids between different compartments, such as between blood vessels and tissue, or from the lower extremities to the upper body. In the case of astronauts and due to weightlessness, this leads to a swollen face, a blocked nose and permanent headaches.

Figure 4. Individual systolic (SAP) and diastolic (DAP) arterial pressures and heart rate (HR) measured on the ISS as well as before and after flight. Recorded during ambulatory conditions when awake (day); in connection with seated cardiac output rebreathing measurements (day); and during the sleep period (night). © 2014 The Physiological Society.

The study's measurements are revealing because they not only measure the astronauts' arterial blood pressure and heart rate, but also show comparative cardiological values before, during and after the spaceflight. Both pressure (contraction and relaxation of the heart muscle) as well as heartbeat, are significantly higher during the in-flight-phase. So falling upwards can potentially be compared to severe headaches and cold symptoms while actively immersing the body in water and leaving the head above its surface; or to quick changes between sitting and reclining positions on ground:

It was therefore unexpected that we found significant increases in stroke volume and cardiac output of as much as 35% and 41% after 3 months or more of flight, and similarly so in all astronauts independent of mission duration. (…) It is comparable to very acute head-out water immersion (Stadeager et al. 1992). Furthermore, the increase is considerably higher compared to when changing from an upright seated posture to supine on the ground, where cardiac output only increases by 15–20%. (Norsk et al. 2015, 579)

This increased fluid-shift-factor affects of course the entire body system and significantly influence all astronauts' perceptive senses; in particular the sense of smell and taste. However, Harvey's prose also makes it clear that this factor – and especially their headaches – not only impair their research, but are themselves scientifically the subject of research in a larger survey and measurement effort. All of them are experimenting on their own bodies, testing and checking the limits and stresses of prolonged weightless existence while falling upwards. Continuous monitoring therefore accompanies constantly their particular scientifical routine tasks. Harvey's protagonists set various examples: “Pietro”, the Italian astronaut monitors his microbes telling them something more about the terrestrial viruses, funguses and bacteria that are present on the craft itself. Therefore, he takes also a swab of his own throat. The female Japanese astronaut “Chie” continues growing her protein crystals, and attaches afterwards herself to the MRI to have one of many routine brain scans that show the impact of microgravity on her neural functioning. Female British astronaut “Nell” checks the well-being of their forty mice residents and their muscle wastage in space. She will pull herself afterwards a syringe for her overused veins. US-astronaut “Shaun” on the other hand monitors thale cress to see what happens to plant roots when they lack gravity and light. Later on, like the others he will sleep with hist chest constricted by straps and monitors which hamper his breath. Finally, the two Russian cosmonauts “Roman” and “Anton”: One services the oxygen generator, the other cultures heart cells. Simultaneously both of them measure repeatedly their grips (Harvey 2024, 16f.) Just a few of many other ex(s)amples:

They take blood, urine, faecal and saliva samples, monitor their heart rates and blood pressure and sleep patterns, document any ache, pain or unusual sensation. They are data. Above all else, that. A means and not an end. (ibid. 94f.)

What is striking about Harvey's literary protagonists is the cohesion of detailed descriptions – based on her full-time analysis of archival and online footage of the ISS and her work experience at the Herschel Astronomy Museum in London (cf. Allardice 2024) – and her poetic radiance of the falling upwards: “They swim in microgravity like little watched fish (Harvey 2024, 93).” A metaphorical sentence that perfectly echoes Virilio’s request in Open Sky, anticipating that the conditions experienced by astronauts will soon be ours: “Soon we will have to learn to fly, to swim in the ether (Virilio 1997, 3).” In interactions with machines and research technology on board, the astronauts receive and generate information, results and data, which on behalf to the ‘gravitas’ of the scientific community is transmitted to the ground station. This involves as well individual inquiring reports: “They will all report on whether they have headaches and where in the head and how acute (ibid. 16).”

VI. Real-Time-Ecology and The Terminal Body

For Virilio, a fitting example, that the astronautical subject transforms into – what he calls – a body terminal human-being; voluntarily plugging its own body into various interfaces of the spacecraft’s infrastructure supported by all kinds of “data suits” (Virilio 1997, 37f.). Protheses, as Virilio polemically exaggerates, that make the super equipped able-bodied astronaut almost an exact equivalent of a motorized and wired, but now wireless and telesurveillanced disabled person (cf. 11). One that is triggered by the growth of real-time technologies by means of satellites and fiber optic cables. Without stretching this polemical claim too much, Virilio’s terminal body is a proper image for the ubiquitous computing of our presence: “The final looping and locking up of a world that has become orbital, not only in terms of circumterrestrial satellites on the beat, but of the entire array telecommunication tools as well (ibid. 61).” In abstract historical terms of his dromology, the place of the observer shifted revolutionary multiple times and most recently with the possibility to fall upwards: While the static geometric observer of the Renaissance had a revolutionary sense of spatial depth, and the motorised observer of the kinetic revolution on his dynamic vehicle (train, motorbike, car, plane) still had a sense of the interval of time and space, the real-time terminal-observer seems to be loosing both: time and space (cf. 11). With the accelerated shift by escape velocity and the speed of light, the real-time revolution not only creates but propels Virilio’s terminal-observers as astronauts into outer space, whose perception seems to be mobilized and conditioned by the illusion that the whole world is beneath their floating bodies without restrictions. That is why, for Virilio again, astronauts were the harbingers of various forms of a “delusion of grandeur” (ibid. 139): “Our astronauts were thus the first to glimpse this general accident that awaits us tomorrow, down here, in this already-here tomorrow of the perpetual present of real-time technologies (ibid).” Thus, Virilio is stretching his laconic figure of thought that every invention of progress invents simultaneously its accident to a “general accident”. For abstract concepts in particular, Lakoff and Johnson also apply the thesis that they not only require metaphors, but that it is precisely the metaphor which enables us to grasp them as physically experienced domains (cf. Lakoff/Johnson 2003, 96). E.g: “LOVE IS A JOURNEY” (ibid. 98). That’s how and why Vrilio’s critique of the real-time regime becomes an accident and bodily risk: SPACE TRAVEL IS AN ACCIDENT. Secondly, that is also the point where the orientational metaphor of falling upwards gets attached to another guiding metaphor by Virilio, namely: “Grey ecology”. A proposition, that the environmental destruction takes place not only in nature, but also in perception by a discreet visual pollution. The overexposure of the visible is connected to the development of the falling upward machines of vision itself: sight-, time- and placeless vision machines for the most of us (ibid. 96). This is why his grey ecology includes also an aesthetic of excess: Too much visibility erases the visible. Like a green ecology protects the nature of things, Virilio proposes his grey ecology that aims to protect the nature of perception (ibid.59). But what happens, when a concept like the “whole world” seems to become ‘flattened’ and consciously ‘shrinked’ to a flip-flop circuit (ibid.116)? Virilio answers: “In a word, ecology as a discipline does not sufficiently register the impact of machine time on the environment (…)” (ibid. 23).

VII. The Apocalypse of the “Hic et Nunc” and Paul Klee’s Counter-Perspective

Virilio’s man-machine dialogue considers the following consequences: Spatial depth becomes surface, time as duration becomes real-time, and physical presence becomes digital telepresence. Or, as quoted: “Terminals” under the regime of a real-time transmitting and receiving power of various signals – destroying our awareness of the “here and now”:

Paul Klee hits the nail on the head: ‘To define the present in isolation is to kill it.’ This is what the teletechnologies of real time are doing: they are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but is the elsewhere of a ‘discreet telepresence’(ibid. 10.).

Virilio's emphasis on Klee’s hit gets much clearer when we refer directly to other statements in Paul Klee’s article “Schöpferische Konfession” of the anthology Tribüne der Kunst und Zeit (1920): There, he not only begins with the much-quoted sentence “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible” (ibid. 28). Furthermore, in contrast to Lessing's definition of the visual arts in Laocoon (1766) as spatial art – as indicated clearly by Klee as a fully ‘lived delusion’ – the Swiss artist emphasizes that a point, which becomes a line; and a line, which becomes surface; and a surface, which becomes space, requires above all one thing: time (cf. 33). That’s why Paul Klee shows how dots and graphs are not limited to measuring abstractly heart rates and discreet telepresence, but present vice versa his discrete elements in use for a genesis of a creational and reflective praxis that, by means of abstraction, is detached from an instantaneous and immediately visible real. Like Virilio, Klee also asks polemically and rhetorically: “Is a work of art created all at once?” And he replies laconically: “No, it is built up piece by piece, just like a house.” He continuous and shifts the perspective to the observer: “And does the observer finish with the work all at once?” And he surprisingly adds a single parenthesis right afterwards: “(Unfortunately, often yes)” (ibid.33). And it’s precisely this single “unfortunately” within Paul Klee’s brackets that Virilio strains in his “temporal apocalypse” (Virilio 1997, 127), where every single one of us becomes a terrestrial astronaut without a “concrete presence”. Instead, so Virilio, we’re embedded in a “discreet telepresence” in favour of a “commutative elsewhere”, which, through real-time-telepresence instantly instils in us what he calls the ‘delusion of grandeur’.

But let us instead briefly set aside Virilio's Apocalypse Now and continue reading Klee’s confession. Klee's approach not only literally illustrates Lakoff and Johnson's physical thesis, but also fills a gap in their theory of the metaphor. Although Lakoff and Johnson use the term ‘perspective’, it seems to be too specific and narrow:

Third, different metaphors can structure different aspects of a single concept; for example, LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS WAR, LOVE IS A PHYSICAL FORCE, LOVE IS MADNESS. Each of these provides one perspective on the concept LOVE and structures one of many aspects of the concept. (ibid. 98)

According to the authors, each metaphor integrates and alters a perspective that highlights a new aspect of the core concept (e.g. LOVE). But their focus on physical anchoring causes them to overlook partially not the fact, but the importance and implications that each perspective has its situational context, social meaning and especially: its media environment. Besides the physical basis, this media factor is not only equally important in determining the meaning of a metaphor, rather it’s a new approach on perspectivism of metaphors itself. As Emmanuel Alloa makes clear in The Share of Perspective (2025), seeing is physical and embodied, but always as well partial, mediated and shared. His main thesis is precisely that perspective is not simply a collection of subjective points of view which might lead to relativism or just encounters the relativity in accessing reality. On the contrary: Perspective, with its reliance on media, creates and shares an intersubjective space. Neither is the visible simply an object ‘out there,’ nor is perspective subjectively ‘in there,’ but rather arises in the intermediated space between the visible and the seeing:“Partial perspective is not so much a deformation as it is a condition of access to reality” (Alloa 2025, 4). And these intersubjective spaces are not only realized, metaphorized and reflected in Klee's own thoughts on perspectival seeing, but captured in sketch forms. Above, we have just emphasized with Klee the temporality of seeing over the dominance of spatially seeing ; a connection that Lakoff/Johnson also make when they say that orientation must be assumed as an inherent property of instants of time if expressions like “follow,” “precede,” “meet the future head on,” “face the future,” etc. Of course, they emphasize the physical basis: “FUTURE EVENTS ARE UP (& AHEAD)” (Lakoff/Johnson 2003, 22 & 101f.). However, Klee's eye(s) cannot be squeezed into such a simple up-down-schema.

Figure 5. Paul Klee, sketch: ‘Ways of Studying Nature’. Wege des Naturstudiums. In: Staatliches Bauhaus 1919–1923. Bauhaus Verlag, Weimar 1923. (cf. Dittmann 1989, 129)

It is Klee’s “cosmic” perspective – precisely an “eye” and “I” that do not simply ‘fall out’ into the ‘outer world’ and mimically reproduce it or subjectively copy it in nuce as a “you” or an “object” – that rather falls upwards between rootedness and gravity on the “metaphysical path” (see fig.6). His perspective as an artist – similar to Alloa’s understanding – is always in an alternating dynamic with reality and his media artistic tools. Surly, like all living beings and all matter on earth, humans are also subject to the law of gravity – the ‘Lot’ – as Klee calls the plumb line in German. However, standstill is only a special case for him: “Even in space, movement is the given. Rest on earth is a random inhibition of matter. To regard this adhesion as primary is a deception” (Klee 1917, 33f.). On one hand, there is the art which carefully differentiates and explores the appearance anchoring the seeing I and the seen object in the earthly realm. And on the other hand, there is a metaphysical path of art that is not optical, but takes place in the dynamics of a shared non-optical, abstract and cosmic way that reveals something new (cf. Dittmann 1989, 128f.). Of course, Klee is convinced of the latter. Klee’s dynamic perception does not succumb to the illusion of the given and the static ground, rather – and perhaps in contradiction to Virilio – his perspective resonates even with a former new and dynamic kinetic revolution. His “modern” perspective escapes, falls, rotates; or falls upwards and sums up his ‘checks and balances’:

A few examples:
A person from ancient times as a boatman in a boat, truly enjoying and appreciating the ingenious convenience of the furnishings. Correspondingly, the depiction of the ancients.
And now: what a modern person experiences when walking across the deck of a steamboat:
1. their own movement, 2. the movement of the ship, which may be in the opposite direction, 3. the direction and speed of the current, 4. the rotation of the Earth, 5. its orbit, 6. the orbits of the moons and stars around it.
The result: a structure of movements in space, with the self on the steamboat at its centre.
(Klee 1920, 37)

A discreet telepresence avant la letter or avant the drawing – but with time and space, ergo: with movement. Klee posits an overview hic et nunc. According to Virilio: This is “unfortunately” a passed perspective conveyed by media(s) which is now in the shadow of acceleration. Nowadays the “delusion of grandeur” prevails. One that sees everything at once and controls everything from afar, and loses itself in the elsewhere and on the surface – losing the ‘here and now’ with its blending density of the past and future; with its duration and embodied rhythms between points and lines while the heart beats. Perception is always perspective-based, and Virilio is indicating, that the varieties of perspectives became automated, accelerated and emptied. However, this automated feature is also reliably programmed to disappoint: Harvey's space crew's priority list includes also comprehensive observations of a typhoon. As their protagonists stick to the panoramic window, it says: “What they see is an unbroken vista of typhoon and a deep sucking well at its centre” (Harvey 2024, 37). And at the same time – equipped with the best optics – Italian astronaut Pietro critically remarks: “Here he is now, a non-robot with a camera and a pair of average eyes and a heart pitching forwards, tripping up, at the earth’s singularity” (ibid. 36). Harvey's poetics reliably interrupts these real-time and muted observations of the typhoon with a singular quality like “anxious”: “They have no power — they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence” (ibid. 24). A powerlessness that reveals Virilio's power of real-time vision and scale, which is causing the “average” embodied sense of space and time to collapse.

VIII. Two-Dimensionality as a Poetic Experiment on Surface

At first glance, Harvey's imaginative Orbital-odyssey seems to outline the omnipresence of a discreet real-time-regime in relation to the scientific language on board: “Their day is mapped by acronyms, MOP, MPC, PGP, RR, MRI, CEO, OESI, WRT for WSS, T-T-A-B.” (Harvey 2024, 16). As indicated by Virilio, within real-time communication, all that remains is the ‘now’ of the signal, a simultaneous connection without location, without duration and without a profound man-machine dialogue – in other words, a symbolic ‘silencing’ despite permanent transmission. Dialogue becomes the mere transmission of signals, in contrast to an exchange between subjects and between men and machines sharing a common time and place. That leads to a disembodied and delocalized language in the sense of speech. That’s how speech loses as well its connection to the ‘here and now’ and thus potentially its social and political dimension. According to Virilio the astronaut’s personality “(…) is split in time between the real time of our immediate activities — in which they act both here and now - and the real time of a media interactivity that privileges the ‘now’ of the time slot” (Virilio 1997, 37). A prediction, we could say that provides a fitting description of today's conference calls: They take place in several sights at the same time, but paradoxically, the electronic connection creates a feeling of alienation among the present participants, accompanied by the feeling of being nowhere (ibid.).
The philosopher and media theorist Sybille Krämer would probably critically remark that Virilios' position clings too strongly to an ideal of spoken language as a meaningful continuum or its absence as silence for contemplation. However, writing and scientific codes are not merely a means of fixing spoken language, but an independent medium of thought, cognition and operation: an “operating space” (cf. Krämer 2005). In operative writing, we do not speak, but think with signs that can be arranged, compared, combined and transformed. Krämer goes even further and says: Writing does not only operate linearly (one line after another), but it uses surface like a two-dimensional image: “What distinguishes writing is a synthesis of the discursive and the iconic” (ibid. 29, trans. by ET). Thus, writing combines the characteristics of language (symbolism, syntax) and images (spatiality, visibility) – it operates horizontally and vertically, figuratively and linguistically. We could especially say that literature is characterized by the possibility of developing the specific potential of writing to a particularly high degree of Krämer’s operational space. Literature works not only with language, but also with the materiality of writing itself: with layout, structure, typography, rhythm, white space, intertextuality, line breaks, typographical symbols and, in Harvey's case: even with a cosmonautical map (see fig.1). While Klee emphasizes the dimensions of time and movement in relation to his discrete elements of point and line, Harvey shows how spatially discrete the imagery of writing also places the accelerated sunrises and sunsets in ‘iconic letters’ (e.g. the sun is up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy) and offers the possibility of a reflective counter-strategy to the scopic real-time regime: "Too bad for you that the Omega Speedmaster watch on your wrist with its chronograph and tachymeter and coaxial escapement has no grasp of the fact that this is your seventh time around the earth since you woke up this morning, that the sun is up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy" (Harvey 2024, 97). It is also a beautifully dizzying structural device to align each chapter with an orbit of the Earth. But there are not just fixed 16 chapters, mirroring the 16 orbits mentioned above; from time to time they are divided into Orbit 3, ascending and orbit 3 descending. The fluid and discreet narrative sends probes into the past and future, but everything is kept within the looping motion of the elliptical journey and, in particular, within the cognitive metaphor of falling upwards. No horizon is fixed; macro and micro levels are separated and mixed in perspective leaps. This also catches the reader's eye in all discretion when a list suddenly appears in Orbit 10 and stops the flow of prose:

(…) They swab their throats. They pull the syringe from their overused veins. All of it gladly.

Maddening things:
Forgetfulness
Questions
Church bells that ring every quarter-hour
Non-opening windows
Lying awake
Blocked noses
Hair in ducts and filters
Fire alarm tests
Powerlessness
A fly in the eye (ibid. 95f.)

As readers, we are able to decide word by word anew whether we are above or below, or whether we lie awake in between. And sometimes a single letter gets our attention:

Six of them in a great H of metal hanging above the earth. They turn head on heel, four astronauts (American, Japanese, British, Italian) and two cosmonauts (Russian, Russian); two women, four men, one space station made up of seventeen connecting modules, seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour. They are the latest six of many, nothing unusual about this any more, routine astronauts in earth’s backyard.

But most of us don’t live as if humbled. Whether, in these iconic overview-images, our world seems large or tiny, central or radically decentered, what is truly remarkable is how quickly our amazement goes back to sleep. How many of us give much of a thought to, say, the hovering H of the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth sixteen times a day as we go about our lives, in earth’s backyard?

Figure 6. The International Space Station in orbit above Earth. (Image © NASA)

A fine example of how even a single letter, in its materiality, can serve like a metaphor, transforming not only primary physical experiences but also the ‘body’ of a high-tech space station into symbolic significance through its similarity in form. But let us return to Virilio's metaphor of falling upwards and examine two further components to conclude.

IX. The Truth is Nomadic

As we have tried to show, Virilio is an apocalypticist par excellence. The sound of his writings is breathless, frantic, hasty and driven by the ever-dwindling time in the real-time apocalypse. With and against Virilio's defiance, we have attempted to demonstrate that media and media technology not only block, damage, and destroy reality, but always serve as ‘mediators’ for accessing it, whether blindly due to overexposure or insightfully. Klee's visual art and Harvey's poetics bear witness to the latter. Nevertheless, Virilio is not a conservative who simply isolates himself and settles comfortably far away from technological developments. As an apocalypticist, i.e. a revolutionary thinker, he escalates every decision into a final either/or between extremes gravitation and levitation; between good and evil; between true and false: Either we learn to swim and fly in the ether of the “Jetzt-Zeit”, or we don't. We have shown that his metaphor of falling upwards not only refers to vertigo, but also provides orientation and evokes counter-strategies in times of escape velocity and speed of light. However, in this final section we would like to show that falling upwards also serves as a cognitive metaphor for weighing up truth without ignoring its emotional dimensions.

Let’s gain therefore another perspective and pick up the sound of Maurice Blanchot’s short essay The Conquest of Space (1964): “It is extraordinary, we have left the earth”, the French philosopher highlights in joyful reference to the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight 1961. And he emphasizes immediately: “Herein lies, indeed, the true significance of the experience: man has freed himself from place” (Blanchot 1995, 269). And Blanchot reminds us as well, that astronauts and cosmonauts remain linked to Earth in a very ambivalent form. Their falling-upwards-situation is characterized by the paradox of simultaneously being the bearers of liberation and being confined to their situation on board:

A man who is the bearer of the very sense of liberty and who has never found himself a greater prisoner of his own position, free of the force of gravity and weighted down more than any other being, on the way to maturity and all bundled up in scientific swaddling clothes, like a new-born child of former times, reduced to nourishing himself with a feeding bottle and to wailing more than talking. (ibid. 270)

The umbilical cord for Blanchot’s Gagagrin – connecting the “new-born child” of outer space to earth – was language. This babbling bottle child, as difficult as it was to understand in the early 1960s due to interference between his orbital positions and earth, as banal as it may have sounded in the face of the new foreign outer space, can’t be interrupted, as Blanchot emphasizes: “The slightest break in the noise would already mean the everlasting void” (ibid.271). Blanchot assures us: “It is therefore necessary, up there, for the man from the Outside to speak, and to speak continually, not only to reassure us and to inform us, but because he has no other link with the old place than that unceasing word” (ibid.). But it is also the “everlasting void” that interests Blanchot imagining Gagarin’s experience: “He has felt, at least for a moment, the sense of something decisive: far away - in an abstract distance of pure science - removed from the common condition symbolized by the force of gravity, there was a man, no longer in the sky, but in space, in a space which has no being or nature but is the pure and simple reality of a measurable (almost) void” (ibid.269). Blanchot thus anticipates the unique moment, the contactless and natureless moment, when no discourse from below – be it politically (Khrushchev/Kennedy), religiously or philosophically motivated – can bind Gagarin back down, rooting and eternally encrusting him in his tradition(s), but rather an utopia without a preconceived horizon emerges. The conquest of space points to a clear but cautiously worded hope: “(…) It is correct to say that the superstition about place cannot be eradicated in us except by a momentary abandonment to some utopia of non-place” (ibid.270). The very same tension between connectedness and ecstasy, humility and megalomania, childhood and utopian outer space, which Virilio so aptly captured in his metaphor, pervades Harvey's Orbital.

They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth. They all feel it from time to time. They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. In their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing, their regulation shorts and spoonable food, the juice drunk through straws, the early nights, the enforced innocence of dutiful days, they all have moments up here of a sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness. Their towering parent ever-present through the dome of glass. (Harvey 2024, 8)

Squeezed in their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing and regulation shorts, Harvey’s protagonists deal with their nostalgic feelings for their home planet Earth. But in return, they are also overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of happiness, which, unlike unhappiness, does not have to tie together the thousands of tragic threads, but ambushes them in a very simple, non-earthly utopian way with everything. Perceiving ‘everything’ while falling upwards means leaving ‘everything’ behind, especially when floors are walls and walls are ceilings and ceilings are floors. Blanchot's insignificant truism and final line in The Conquest of Space not only serves us the right reading glasses for our last passage from Harvey’s Orbital, but also draws our attention to a reliability that always applies – provided we listen carefully to the signals, lines, dots, panels of screens, airlocks…and metaphors; “That the truth is nomadic” (Blanchot 1995, 271).

At some point in their stay in orbit there comes for each of them a powerful desire that sets in — a desire never to leave. A sudden ambushing by happiness. They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places — from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they’re trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings which are floors. From the handholds which are foot- holds which chafe the toes. From the spacesuits, which wait in the airlocks somewhat macabre. Everything that speaks of being in space — which is everything — ambushes them with happiness, and it isn’t so much that they don’t want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded — grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself.

X. Bibliography

Alloa, Emmanuel (2025): The Share of Perspective. New York and London: Routledge.

Blanchot, Maurice (1995): "The Conquest of Space". In: The Blanchot Reader, ed. Mike Holland. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 269-271.

Dittmann, Lorenz (1989): «Werk und Natur -Erörterungen unter dem Aspekt der Farbgestaltung». In: Kunstgeschichte - aber wie? Zehn Themen und Beispiele. Hrsg. v. Fruh, Clemens; Rosenberg, Raphael; Rosinski, Hans-Peter. Berlin, S. 109-140.

Harvey, Samantha (2024): Orbital. Dublin: Penguin Random House.
Jay, Martin (1988): "Scopic Regimes of Modernity". In: Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 3-27.

Klee, Paul (1920): «Schöpferische Konfession». In: Tribüne der Kunst. Hrsg. v. Kasimir Edschmid. Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, S. 28-40.

Krämer, Sybille (2005): «‚Operationsraum Schrift‘. Über einen Perspektivenwechsel in
der Betrachtung der Schrift». In: Schrift. Kulturtechnik zwischen Auge, Hand und
Maschine. Hrsg. v. Gernot Grube, Werner Kogge u. Sybille Krämer. München: Fink,
S. 23–60.

Lakoff, Georg & Johnson, Mark (2003): Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Norsk, Peter (2015): «Fluid shifts, vasodilatation and ambulatory blood pressure reduction during long duration spaceflight». In: The Journal of Physiology, 593(3), pp. 573–584.

Telotte, J.P. (2006): “The Gravity of 2001: A Space Odyssey”. In: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, ed. by Robert Kolker. New York: Oxford Press, pp. 43-54.

Virilio, Paul (1997): Open Sky. London, New York: Verso.

Lilian Kroth

UNIFR

[22/11/2024]

Still from Satellite Séance, 2020; Video by open-weather in collaboration with Matthew Philips, Hanna Rullmann and Jol Thoms. See more

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.

Jacqueline Maurer

OST

[13/01/2025]

Fig. 1 The Viadotto Fausto Bisantis (1958–62) by the civil engineer Riccardo Morandi in Catanzaro, Calabria, documented in Folco Quilici’s L’Italia vista dal cielo (IT 1967).

Fig. 2 The infrastructural landscape outside Rome filmed for Folco Quilici’s L’Italia vista dal cielo (IT 1975).

Helivision

For example L’Italia vista dal cielo (IT 1966–78)

In the post-war period, Europe faced enormous planning challenges: The reconstruction of primary infrastructures for supply, security and transport as well as city centres, institutions and neighbourhoods, the planning and realisation of urban expansions, large housing estates and new towns to fight the often late-approached, worsening housing crisis were documented, at least in Western Europe, by the simultaneously 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 taking a critical look at them. Planning projects, including master plans and models, were presented and discussed by commentators and experts; new residential neighbourhoods, especially housing estates, were visited by reporters and residents were interviewed. In some cases, no expense was spared, as 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 these aerial shots established become a central issue: the combination of helicopter technology and flight (Boulet 1982, Boyne 2011, Carey 1986, Watkinson 2004), human eye and camera eye can be summarised under the term ‘helivision’.

By focusing on post-war planning and its mediation, advertisment and critiques through television and vertical images (Adey 2013, Parks 2018, Sandoz/Weber 2022a/b), helivision can be conceived in two ways and within two contexts of application: on the one hand, it operates in the field of civilian exploration and documentation. Here, it serves as a cinematographic dispositive that, through the interplay 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 and morphological structures. In contrast to (cartographic) aerial photographs usually taken from a higher distance from an airplane, helivision conveys its own characteristic optics and gaze of buildings, urban fabrics, infrastructure, landscape and territory. In addition to this civilian use, helivision also provides a military use: here, helivision enables prosthetic vision through the application 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 such as the US anti-Vietnam-War film Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola (1979), as well as with camera technologies that prosthetically extend the human gaze.

The ambitious and extensive film project “L’Italia vista dal cielo”, created by Folco Quilici between 1966 and 1978, is an exceptional large-scale helivision project which aimed to capture an entire country from the air. In the mid-1960s, Esso Italiana commissioned a film documentary series on an unprecedented scale: the filmmaker, author and pioneer of underwater filming Folco Quilici (see Ballardini 1985, Caputi 1999/2000, Quilici/Cantini 2002) and his team filmed all of Italy’s regions from the air to bring them close to a national and international audience (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). His efforts resulted in 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 evidence historical maps juxtaposed to 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, written by Quilici together with other famous authors, preferably from the respective region.

The film’s visual level focused primarily on Italy’s long history with buildings from antiquity to more recent times as well as unspoiled areas of the country and cultural landscapes. However, with an equal interest in the contemporary, it also showed more recent building projects commented on in different ways: The first episode broadcasted in 1968 was not dedicated to Lazio and the Roman capital where Esso Italiana had established its headquarters, but to two southern regions, Basilicata and Calabria. Towards the end of this first episode, the visual and narrative strands set a striking amount of hope in the building of the new motorway (Fig. 1). According to the voice over, written by Quilici and Giuseppe Berto, this infrastructural project of regional and national importance would connect Southern Italy, which had been “isolated for thousands of years”, to the rest of the country and especially to the Autostrada del Sole which linked Milan via Bologna, Florence and Rome to Naples. In contrast, the eleventh episode about Lazio produced in 1975 and thus towards the completion of the series, reveals a diametrically opposed attitude towards more recent building activities, as the motorway infrastructures and the new districts rapidly built on the outskirts of Rome in the post-war period were harshly criticised in the voice over text (Fig. 2).

In June 1978, Italy’s public broadcasting company RAI showed for the first time the entire series of “L’Italia vista dal cielo”. It was completed in the same year after twelve years of production. The timing of the first broadcast shortly before the long summer holidays was obviously chosen with care: due to the affordability of cars, Italian people had become more mobile in the postwar years and could draw inspiration from the series when choosing their holiday destinations – discovering them on television thanks to the hovering camera view of “helivision” and reaching them by car thanks to the motorway and Esso petrol tank fill-ups.

Bibliography:

Adey, Peter, Whitehead, Mark, and Williams, Alison J. (eds.), From Above: War, Violence, and Verticality, Hurst, London 2013.

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.

Parks, Lisa, Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror, Routledge, New York 2018.

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.

Teodosio, Annarita, ‘Cities from the Sky: Aerial Photography in Select 20th-Century Italian

Watkinson, John, Art of the Helicopter, Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford 2004.

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.

Nicolò Pioli

Sapienza University of Rome

[23/04/2025]

Operative Images

In CNN's 24h media coverage of the Gulf War amidst the images of armaments and devastated landscapes one could see the Head-Up Display (HUD) images that U.S. soldiers used during military operations. These are, for example, infrared videos of aerial footage with a crosshair in the centre, showing air-to-ground missile explosions. Harun Farocki showed some of these images at the beginning of his installation Eye/Machine (2000-2003), he calls them “operational images”. One example he presents is a “suicide camera” on a laser-guided bomb, showing the view from the warhead’s perspective as it swoops down on the target from above. The image becomes more detailed as the missile approaches the ground, until the footage stops when it impacts the surface. Farocki calls this type of image a “phantom-subjective image” (2004, p. 13) for it simulates the human point of view from a position that a human being could not occupy. This image captures what the missile saw, while we, as viewers, observe safely from a distance, neither victims nor perpetrators.

These are not images produced for TV viewers; they are low resolution, partial, and do not capture attention. They are primarily made for technicians. Soldiers that monitor the operation are part of the feedback mechanism of intelligent weapons, but they do not always have decision-making power. As television viewers, we do not know the real military function of these images; they show a view from above at such a distance that human figures cannot be distinguished, we barely recognise the outline of streets and buildings.

According to Farocki, such images are an “ad for intelligent machines” (Eye/Machine III), while Baudrillard had spoken of a war of “means”, the purpose of which was advertising future armaments (1995, p. 33). These images are a mere link in the military production pipeline. They do not show war in its entirety; they just allow us to imagine what the machine sees as it turns geography into a theatre of operations (TO).

Norbert Wiener already used the term “operative image” (1964, p. 31) to describe the process by which a machine reproduces itself, i.e., transfers its operative scheme to another machine. It can also transfer an operative scheme from a black box to a white box, so that a human user can see how the operation works. The fact that these images faithfully reproduce an object, as “pictorial images” (ibid.) do, is secondary. What matters is that they correctly perform the function of being transducers that communicate information to a machine. For Wiener, the operative image is used to explain how machines communicate with each other and how, at times, one machine shows us the functioning of another machine we cannot know.

In Eye/Machine, Farocki adopts the notion of operational images to describe images embedded in procedures of computation, surveillance and military control. Examples shown by Farocki include surveillance videos depicting crowded streets; videos mounted on missile warheads or recorded by drones; videos used in experiments to build autonomous vehicles; computer graphic simulations; satellite images of airports; surgical images depicting the inside of a patient’s body. “These are images that do not represent an object, but rather are part of an operation” (2004, p. 17).

Farocki examines the paradox of an image devoid of transcendence, which must be conceived as a link in a chain of recognition and tracking operations. The adjective “operational” could come from the notion of “operational language” formulated by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. That is, a language “transitively linked to its object” (1957, p. 146). Like the technical images analysed by Vilém Flusser, Farocki’s operative images are endowed with an apparently objective and non-symbolic character (2013, p. 15).

The examples given by Farocki concern both images on which picture processing techniques are used and images produced through digital synthesis, functioning as interfaces to monitor an operation. They produce effects because they are embedded in a network of operation and vision where each image “communicates with other images before communicating to us” (Parisi 2021, p. 1284). Trevor Paglen continued Farocki’s reflection, going so far as to state that one should speak of ‘invisible images’, since they are images whose operations take place regardless of whether they are seen or not. Maybe the fact that they are shown to the user must be thought of as a “gesture of courtesy” (Pantenburg 2016, p. 49), from the machine to the human being, which sometimes is not required for the operation to be completed.

The analysis of operative images develops from Farocki’s earlier reflection on the use of the image from above in the military context. He had analysed the connection between projection and destruction in Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989). He had identified Meydenbauer’s photogrammetry as the origin of the impingement of photography within military surveillance systems. Photogrammetry consists of the reversal of the technique of perspective to derive the measurements of an object through photography (Parikka 2023). It had been converted into an instrument of territorial control during the Franco-Prussian War by using it in conjunction with a system of photographic observation from above (Cosgrove & Fox 2010; Bousquet 2018; Saint-Amour 2011). The technique of projecting lines onto the image enabled it to gain its “autonomy” (Steyerl 2016) from the observer. Contemporary machine vision relies on a similar technique of dissecting the image surface into discrete elements (Manovich 1996).

The paradigmatic case of operative images remains the aerial images shown by the media-entertainment network during the Gulf War (Virilio 2005; Baudrillard 1995). Farocki argues that Gulf War images allow us to see what a war between machines would be like (Chandler 2020; DeLanda 1991). Operative images show the utopia of a “cleanly led war” (Farocki 2004, p. 21) in which human casualties are outside of the picture. In addition to the paradoxicality of weapons that operate considering the victims they kill as a side effect, we must take into account the paradoxicality of an image produced by one machine for another machine, without anyone seeing it. Both are to be considered extreme cases: “There are no pictures that do not aim at the human eye. A computer can process pictures, but it needs no pictures to verify or falsify what it reads in the images it processes. For the computer, the image in the computer is enough.” (ibid.).

The operative images that appeared on television in 1991 are the final stage of a history that links military operations, aerial surveying and machine vision. Through computation, automatic procedures indiscriminately scan geography to perfect operational art. Aerial images provide the extractive base through which the infrastructure for the security management of territories is held up. The centrality of remote sensing in contemporary warfare has evolved into a conflict between machines outside the human scale. Operative images are the interface through which to grasp this post-human military-industrial complex.

References:

Alloa, E. (2021). Seeing-as, Seeing-in, Seeing-with: Looking through Pictures. In Purgar K. (Eds.). The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies. Springer.

Barthes, R. (2015). Mythologies. The Noonday Press.

Baudrillard, J. (1995). The Gulf War did not Take Place. Indiana University Press

Bousquet, A. (2018). The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone. University of Minnesota Press.

Chamayou, G. (2015). Drone Theory. Penguin UK.

Chandler, K. (2020). Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare. Rutgers University Press.

Cosgrove, D., & Fox, W. L. (2010). Photography and Flight. Reaktion Books.

DeLanda, M. (1991). War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Zone Books.

Dobson, J. E. (2023). The Birth of Computer Vision. University of Minnesota Press.

Farocki, H. (2004). Phantom Images. Public, 29. 13-22.

Flusser, V. (2013). Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books.

Hoel, A. S. (2018). Operative Images. Inroads to a New Paradigm of Media Theory. In Feiersinger, L., Friedrich, K. & Queisner, M. (Eds.). Image – Action – Space: Situating the Screen in Visual Practice. De Gruyter.

Kaplan, C. (2017). Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. Duke University Press.

Krämer, S. (2009). Operative Bildlichkeit. Von der “Grammatologie” zu einer “Diagrammatologie”? Reflexionen über erkennendes “Sehen”. In Heßler, M. & Mersch, D. (Eds.). Logik des Bildlichen Zur Kritik der ikonischen Vernunft. De Gruyter.

MacKenzie, A., & Munster, A. (2019). Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and their Invisualities. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(5). 3-22.

Manovich, L. (1996). The automation of sight: from photography to computer vision. In Druckrey T. (Eds.). Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. Aperture.

Mersch, D. (2019). Operation/Operativität. In Liggieri K., & Müller O. (Eds.). Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion: Handbuch zu Geschichte–Kultur–Ethik. JB Metzler.

Paglen, T. (2016). Invisible Images: Your Pictures are Looking at You. The New Inquiry.

Pantenburg V. (2016). Working Images: Harun Farocki and the Operational Image. In Eder, J., & Klonk, C. (Eds.). Image Operations: Visual Media and Political Conflict. Manchester University Press.

Parikka, J. (2023). Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. University of Minnesota Press.

Parisi, L. (2021). Negative Optics in Vision Machines. AI & Society, 36(4). 1281-1293.

Saint-Amour, P. K. (2011). Applied Modernism: Military and Civilian Uses of the Aerial Photomosaic. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(7-8). 241-269.

Schwarzer, M. (2004). Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media. Princeton Architectural Press.

Somaini, A. (2010). Visual Surveillance. Transmedial Migrations of a Scopic Form. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2.145-159.

Steyerl, H. (2016). Medya: Autonomy of Images. in Poitras L. (Eds.). Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance. Yale University Press

Virilio, P. (2005). Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. A&C Black.

Wiener, N. (1966). God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. MIT press.

Lucrezia Pozzi

USI/SUPSI

[16/01/2025]

Telearchics

1946 is undoubtedly the year when an exciting yet insidious possibility of space domination opens up to the world, representing the last and most advanced phase of air power, which Burnet Hersey defines with a brilliant neologism as "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 Crossroads 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. Crossroads 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.

Figure 1. “High altitude view”, Baker Test, taken from United States. Joint Task Force One. (1946). Operation Crossroads: the official pictorial record. WH Wise & Company, Incorporated.

Crossroads makes concrete the concept of telearchics - the domain at a distance – as suggested by the etymology of the term which combines distance (τῆλε, tele) and command (αρχία, archia) but also platonically the principle (ἀρχή, archè) of becoming and movement that passes through forms of domination of the atmosphere, air and ether.

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 Crossroads, 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.

Fig 2. “Test of a B-17 Flying Fortress drone, converted into BQ-7 missile, at Wendover Army Air, Field, Utah”, 1944, Critical Past.

Fig 3. "Gunners fire 50 caliber guns on a OQ-2A radio controlled drone for anti-aircraft target practice in the United States", 1944, Critical Past.

Fig. 4 “Exit the backseat driver”, taken from United States. Joint Task Force One. (1946). Operation Crossroads: the official pictorial record. WH Wise & Company, Incorporated.

Through the sacred triad of eye, hand, and device, and the ability to dominate space remotely via electromagnetic waves, a new strategy of war and a new "logistics of perception" emerges in history, where the absolute imperative remains "projecting power, without projecting vulnerability" (Chamayou, 2015).

And this has been the case since Crossroads 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.

Jacqueline Maurer

OST

[10/09/2025]

Fig. 1 Artist Dani Karavan (in the blue shirt) with the moderator, Pierre Mehaignerie (Minister for construction and traffic), and Marcel Henri Louvet (businessman) in front of the scale model of Bofill’s Les Colonnes de Saint-Christophe and the first part of Karavan’s Axe majeur. TF1 Treize heures (TF1 Actu), TF1, 08.10.1987 © INA Archives)

Fig. 2 The Eiffel Tower’s watchman looking down on the Champ de Mars in René Clair’s Paris qui dort (FR 1925).

Urban Axes

Architectural, urban, and landscape planning as well as mapping and cartography have ever since to be understood in the context of control and power, of representation of order, hygiene, and of economic growth (Crampton 2006; Harvey 1985; Lefebvre 1919 [1975], 43–45, 84–86, 232–33, 300, 329). Urban axes—as impressive perspectives seen from the ground and emblematic artefacts conceived and visible from above—embody these intentions of ‘order’ literally, metaphorically, and symbolically. In Paris and the Paris region, we encounter an exemplary historical continuity of axial planning under different political, economic, social and cultural conditions.

“Whenever artistic planning is discussed, it is always necessary to mention, sooner or later, Paris. It is here that just this balance between the aerial view and man-in-the-street view is attained.“ (Abercrombie 1919, 705) What the British architect and urban planner Patrick Abercrombie describes in his article published in 1919 as a peculiarity of the Parisian cityscape bears witness to its famous perspectives on street level and its aerial images as iconic motifs connected with Paris' pioneering role in aerial photography: while Nadar first photographed the French capital from a balloon in 1858 and then more intensively from 1868 (Gervais 2013), the platforms of the Tour Eiffel, erected for the Exposition universelle, were used for aerial photography from 1889 onwards. These rapidly disseminated images represent the conquest of airspace, indeed they “anticipated the aerial experience” according to Jean-Louis Cohen with reference to Siegfried Giedion (Cohen 2006, 9, Giedion 1928, 6–9). At the beginning of the 20th century, these aerial photographs were used as models by the painter Robert Delaunay to celebrate the geometry of the city as seen from above (Mondenard 2018). René Clair's 1925 film Paris qui dort begins on the Eiffel Tower and takes the protagonist down into the streets. In Clair's film, the view from above interacts with the view from below in that the camera first captures the aerial view of the Champ de Mars through a spectacular tilting movement (fig. 2), then it films the monument out of steel from base to top. In the 1950s, the photographer and pilot Roger Henrard expanded the compendium of photographic aerial views of Paris (sHenrard 1952; Cohen 2006), while from the 1960s onwards, television increasingly used aerial film footage in its coverage of construction projects in the région parisienne.

But let us return to Abercrombie and his emphatic statement from 1919 about the unique balance between street view and aerial view in the planning of the French capital: His observation immediately brings to mind Paris' famous perspectives and incisions in the urban morphology through street axes and perimeter block developments from the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century, as well as the axes of the well composed parks. While axes and street grids already defined the layout of Lutetia—the Gallo-Roman city from which the French capital developed—, the most famous axial parks of Versailles and the Parc des Tuileries date back to the 17th century landscape and garden designer André Le Nôtre under Louis XIV. Axiality symbolised the monarch's symmetrical ordering of nature and his watchful eye over his territory (Schweizer 2013). It is well known that the city prefect George-Eugène Haussmann, appointed under Napoleon III and in charge from 1853 to 1870, was responsible for drilling massive axial boulevards into the dense network of irregular neighbourhoods. It was not only a side effect, that the large boulevards made insurrectional barricades almost impossible. The axial transformations can be compared with earlier planning tendencies in Paris as well as with interventions such as those in papal Rome under Sixtus V at the end of the 16th century (Loyer 1992, 192). The so-called Haussmannisation promised a modernisation boost for Paris in the 19th century, which followed the principle of renewal through destruction. After Le Corbusier proposed a grid of high-rise buildings over historic Paris in the 1920s with his radical Plan Voisin for a renewal of Paris, the theme of urban axes came back into focus in the planning and development of the post-war period. According to the Schéma directeur de l'aménagement et de l'urbanisme de la région parisienne SDAURP, developed in the 1960s under Paul Delouvrier and introduced in 1965, conceptual axes, namely the “axes préférentiels”, were to ensure ‘order’ in the Paris region as a countermeasure to the hitherto barely controlled growth (SDAURP 1966).
The urban planning and architectural interventions in the French capital carried out under President François Mitterrand in the 1980s and 90s as part of the Grands projets extended Paris' central visual axis from the Louvre via the Arc de Triomphe to the Grande Arche in the La Défense business district. Since then, this Axe historique has linked historical and contemporary monuments both structurally and symbolically (see Chaslin 1985; Schmid 1996; Fierro 2003). Meanwhile, the sculptural project Axe majeur (1980–2008, to be expanded, https://www.axe-majeur.info/historique/histoire) by Israeli artist Dani Karavan (1931–2021) in the “ville nouvelle” Cergy-Pontoise, northwest of Paris, represents a rather quiet, but still powerful gesture towards the turn to the 21st century (Mollard 2011). The Axe majeur—planned together with the housing estate Les Colonnes de Saint-Christophe (1981–86) by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura—continues the history of axial planning (fig. 3), in which ground and aerial perspectives complement each other, within the Paris Region (fig. 2).

Fig. 3 A simplified topographical drawing showing that the Axe majeur meets the extension of the Axe historique on the Île des impressionistes, Source: https://www.axe-majeur.info/historique/histoire

Fig. 4 Bofill’s Les Colonnes de Saint-Christophe and Karavan’s Axe majeur in Cergy-Pontoise seen from above. (Ciel, ma géo ! : Cergy, l'évolution d'une ville nouvelle (Les écrans du savoir), France 5, 27.10.2000 © INA Archives

Fig. 5 Dani Karavan’s Axe majeur in Cergy-Pontoise and the skyscrapers of La Défense on the horizon, 10.04.2025 © Jacqueline Maurer

The television coverage of the Axe majeur (fig. 1 & 4) at the end of the 20th century makes it clear that Patrick Abercrombie's observation of the “balance between the aerial view and man-in-the-street view” (Abercrombie 1919, 705) with regard to planning campaigns of Paris, was transferred to the landmark of Cergy-Pontoise: visual and symbolic perspectives arise precisely from the interweaving of views on the ground and from the air (fig. 5). The Axe historique is expanded and simultaneously reinterpreted with Karavan's Axe majeur to create an image and universal meaning beyond the local reference, also by alluding to astronomy. While Karavan repeated the uniqueness of his work in the media, the clients at statal, departmental and municipal level as well as sponsors from the business world had a very clear political and economic aim: to generate visibility in order to promote further construction work in Cergy-Pontoise and to attract more businesses.

Urban axes and grid plans, made from an addition of axes, have existed for some thousands of years: Mohenjo-Daro (circa 2800–2500 BC), situated in today’s Pakistan, is the oldest known city with a grid plan (Stanislawski 1946). The “grid” though “has become a metaphor for modernity at large” (Rose Redwood 2008, 54) as we encounter it especially in modern urban planning, architecture, art, and graphic design. The much longer history of the implementation of urban axes and grid plans can, against Dan Stanislawski’s argument, neither only be linked to “authoritarian dictatorships, as they also have been planned in “liberal democracies just as easily as [in] capitalist or socialist regimes” (Rose-Redwood 2008; Brown 2001; Stanislawski 1946). Paris and its region, especially with the ville nouvelle Cergy-Pontoise, is an exemplar of the genealogy and longue durée of the urban axis planned from above under different political and aesthetic regimes.

Bibliography:
Abercrombie, Patrick. 1919. “Aerial Photography and Town Planning.” Country Life 45, (1170): 703–5.
Brown, K. 2001. “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place. “ American Historical Review 106 (1): 17–48.

Chaslin, François. 1985. Les Paris de François Mitterrand: histoire des grands projets architecturaux. Paris: Gallimard.

Cohen, Jean-Louis. 2006. Above Paris. The Aerial Survey of Roger Henrard. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Crampton, Jeremy W. 2006. “Maps as Social Constructions. Power, Communication and Visualization.” Progress in Human Geography 25, 2 (June): 135–52.

Fierro, Annette. 2003. The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle. Paris, 1981–1998. Cambridge (Mass.)/London.

Gervais, Thierry. 2013. “Expérimentations photographiques. La vision en plongée, de Nadar (1858) à Gaston Tissandier (1885).” In: Vues d'en haut, exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 18.05.–07.10.2013, ed. by Angela Lampe, 50–61. Metz: Centre Pompidou.

Giedion, Siegfried. 1928. Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton. Berlin/Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann Verlag.

Harley, J.B. 1988. “Maps, Knowledge, and Powert”. In The Iconography of Landscape, ed. By Denis E. Cosgrove, and Stephen Daniels. 277–312.

Henrard, Roger. 1952. Paris vu du ciel. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2009 [1975]. “Space and State” [chapter from De l’État, 1975]. In: Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World, Selected Essays, ed. by Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden. 223–53. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.

Loyer, François. (1992). “Le Paris d’Haussmann.” In: Paris, La ville et ses projets/A City in the Making, exhibition catalogue, expanded edition, ed. by Jean-Louis Cohen, and Bruno Fortier, 192–200. Paris: Éditions Babylone/Pavillon de L’Arsenal.

Mollard, Claude (ed.). 2011. La saga de l'axe majeur: Dani Karavan à Cergy-Pontoise. Issy-les-Moulineux: Beaux Arts éditions.

Mondenard, Anne de. 2018. “Der Eiffelturm in all seinen Facetten.“ In: Robert Delaunay und Paris, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthaus Zürich, 31.08.–18.11.2018, ed. by Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft/Kunsthaus Zürich, 136–43. Zürich/Heidelberg/Berlin: Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft/Kunsthaus Zürich/Kehrer Verlag.
Rose-Redwood, Reuben S. 2008. “Genealogies of the Grid: Revisiting Stanislawski's Search for the Origin of the Grid Pattern Town.“ Geographical Review 98 (1): 42–58.

Schmid, Erik. 1996. Staatsarchitektur der Ära Mitterrand in Paris, Ästhetische Konzeption und politische Wirkung. Regensburg: S. Roderer Verlag.

Schweizer, Stefan. 2013. André le Nôtre und die Erfindung der französischen Gartenkunst. Berlin: Wagenbach.

[SDAURP] Délégation générale au district de la région de Paris. 1966. Schéma Directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris, 1965.

Stanislawski, Dan. 1946. “The Origin and Spread of the Grid-Pattern Town.“ Geographical Review 36 (1): 105–120.

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