Being in Two Places at Once: Art and the geopolitics of remote sensing
Tuesday 20 March 2018 — 9:30am – 7pm
NYU Tisch Dean’s Conference Room
721 Broadway, 12th Floor
See Tisch website for Program + RSVP
Scales and subjectivities of vision and photography are transforming under the influence of remote-sensing arrays, machine visions, and global observation systems. Computational and composite photography capture not just an image in time, but also in space, permitting 1:1 digitization and replication of spatial objects, bodies, and landscapes. Remote sensing offers at once extended apparatuses of viewing, feeling, and operating in the world, as well as expanded dynamics of population control. These large-scale spatial mapping technologies are primarily deployed, administered, and understood by economically dominant world powers and multinational scientific consortia. Asymmetrical power relations are thus reproduced and amplified at the planetary scale. There is an urgency for these images and models to be legible to wider publics and constituencies than solely at the levels of industry, military, and governance.
How can artists operate within these scales of perception for new imaginative and political potential? What kinds of interventions, trespasses, transformative subjectivities are occurring through the deliberate decolonization and appropriation of networks of remote sensing by those on the peripheries of power?