The geography of our geography: counter-mapping infrastructures of power
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
The geography of our geography: counter‑mapping infrastructures of power Donald Weber1,2 Accepted: 30 September 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020
Abstract This artistic work sets out to devise a set of critical and artistic strategies to sense the ways in which the sky is structured under a fusion of state and corporate power. By placing the military drone as a central actor, I argue the atmosphere is enveloped within a topography of enclosure, reconfigured in the service of military and corporate technologies. By using an artistic strategy of what I term counter-reconnaissance, a necessary inversion of the satellite’s gaze, we may conceive of, and value, the atmosphere as a material entity; a parallel sky that is vivid and tangible, political and aesthetic. Counterreconnaissance utilizes the narrative terrain of Google Earth, where its open and accessible data can be used to help map the shadow states—and invisible rules—that structures and encloses space all around us. This method counter-maps global American military drone infrastructure and makes it palpable to the viewer, creating a constellation of violent geographies. Keywords Counter-reconnaissance · Military drone · (Counter)-mapping · Google earth · Aesthetics Look up into the sky, and what do you see? This question has always been present in my life; I recall my teachers telling me to “get my head out of the clouds.” At first glance, all we might see are beautiful fluffy clouds, a blue sky, or a redolent night sky, filled with constellations of flaming gas. A few summers ago, I was looking up into the night, and I noticed a particular bright light that just seemed to hover; it was too bright to be a star, too fat and bulbous, lying somewhat heavy up in space. Then a plane flew overhead. Then, a satellite streaked across, and then another one. I started to count these dots in the sky, the ones that were transiting across the cosmos, left to right, up and down, leaving a kind of technological inscription across the atmosphere in their wake (Figs. 1, 2). What I saw was a parallel sky, inorganic and mechanical. This sky forms a different landscape, not bound by the terrestrial surface of the earth, but one with its own palpable form, comprised of physical objects sent up beyond the clouds and into space. In the nineteenth century, British astronomer William Herschel built telescopes so he could * Donald Weber [email protected] 1
Royal Academy of Art, Den Haag, The Netherlands
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
2
imagine what he called “the topography of the universe” (Belisle 2012). So I want to know: what is the topography of the sky in the twenty-first century? In what ways are we becoming bound within a form of atmospheric enclosure? For geographer Ian Shaw, this enclosure is performed by machines—namely, the military drone—a mediator between the terrestrial, spectral, atmospheric and orbital (Shaw 2016) (Fig. 3). By foregrounding the drone, I can think of ways to conceive of, sense, and value the atmosphere not j
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