Abstract
As an academic and artist working at the intersection between architecture, visual culture and digital technology, Laura Kurgan presents an intriguing socio-historic account of the development of satellite imagery, GPS navigation and the spatial revolution ushered in by these technologies. Today, maps dominate our social landscape. They are incorporated into nearly every piece of digital hardware from Smart watches to Smart phones to computers and tablets to the dashboards of millions of vehicles worldwide. Getting lost has never been so difficult. Yet, for Kurgan, the notion of the map is far more expansive and ideological than this might suggest. She notes that ‘the spaces that maps try to describe can be ideal, psychological, virtual, immaterial, or imaginary – and they are never just physical’ (p. 16). Thus, it is through the optics of satellite imagery (specifically those images derived from a militaristic or logistic worldview) that Kurgan examines how we might critically examine the complex relations between ‘technologies of spatial representation’ and the ‘space they represent, beyond simply representing them’ (p. 13).
Kurgan’s text is broken down into two fundamental sections. In the first three chapters (which contain the bulk of her theoretical inquiry), she considers the changing ways in which we now perceive and make sense of the world due to the ubiquity of satellite imagery. Starting with the ‘Blue Marble’ – the iconic photograph of the Earth taken from space in 1972 to its 2002 digitalized remake – Kurgan questions the reorientation of our world image through digitization. She traces the thinking of Rosalyn Deutsche, Jonathan Pike and Bruno Latour to argue that reality has become lost in a sea of representation. For her, the map has become the territory, evoking postmodernity’s problems with objective truth and reality. Nothing new there. While Kurgan’s ideas are interesting, her engagement with (postmodern, spatial, or visual) theory feels limited and, at times, becomes disconnected to the book’s later research projects. For example, others (Pickles, 2003; Virilio and Camiller, 1989; Wood and Fels, 1992) have contributed much to the debate that surrounds the politics of mapping and the role that military technology has played in shaping our perception of space and place. Disappointingly, these thinkers (and many more working in these fields) are omitted from Kurgan’s research. It leaves the text feeling as if it has been written in a vacuum. Paul Virilio, for example, uses his neologism ‘vison machines’ to describe the shift towards new technologies of representation that have replaced our direct mode of human experience. The use of screens, computers and cameras, together with satellite imagery have radically altered our optics of reality, resulting in an ontological detachment from the natural world and its material spaces to a lived-in new temporal–spatial mode of being. This area of representation and its implications for contemporary culture are seldom explored by Kurgan. Moreover, she avoids addressing some of the cultural issues that surround our new diet of hyper-mediated satellite imagery. For instance, how might our new in-direct world view(s) destabilize or de-centre our collective identity or understanding of the local? Thus, the ‘political’ element of the book’s title remains elusive to the reader.
Notwithstanding, Kurgan’s thinking leads her to consider how GPS technology has ‘tied maps and clocks ever closer together’ (p. 23), resulting in a fusion between the theory of relativity and technological innovations that can measure, pinpoint and track any geographical region on the planet. Why is this significant?, she asks. Because time itself becomes spatialized and compressed. Others, such as the anthropologist Marc Augé (1995: 45) assert that this ‘compression of spacetime’ is characteristic of ‘supermodernity’, in which ‘history becomes current events, space becomes images, and the individual merely a gaze’. As a result, detailed satellite images accessed via the internet now allow users to voyeuristically browse the globe in near real time. It is with this thinking in mind that Kurgan ruminates:
in these days when virtual co-ordinates direct missiles to their targets and social networks have allowed phone companies and other collectors of our data trails to predict our next move in physical space . . . we can never be sure which co-ordinate systems take priority in terms of representing our identity or our spatial movements. (p. 18)
She warns that, if we continue to integrate cartography into our social lives, we inevitably run the risk of omitting valuable details from our field of view. Maps are always open to interpretation – a point that Kurgan demonstrates through a discussion of the surveillance images that framed the US military decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Viewed as a gold standard in objectivity, the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell asserted the provenance of the photographs as proof that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction. Ultimately, this claim proved to be incorrect. For Kurgan, this case study highlights the mutable and often politicalized readings inherent in all map reading. To this end, she introduces the term ‘para-empiricism’ to reflect this interpretive bias.
Originally conceived as a series of Research as Research investigations, the second section of the text is, as one might gather, more conceptual, being organized around nine geospatial exhibition projects that fuse cultural commentary, history, art and politics. Each mapping project aims to ‘expose the materials they work with in order to reclaim, repurpose, and discover their inadvertent, sometimes critical, often propositional, uses’ (p. 17). Here the text is complemented by a number of high-quality satellite images. Certainly, Kurgan’s intent in ‘repurposing’ (p. 14) each of the visual projects she explored bear merit. The book spans an eclectic range of subjects, themes and topics that include an examination of the war crimes in the Balkans, the 9/11 terrorist attack, the Gulf War and the effects of globalization on the Earth’s rainforests. In each case, Kurgan attempts to show the ‘militaristic’ politics contained within. Later, she offers an insightful discussion that outlines the history of GPS and reconnaissance satellite technology, emerging first as a clandestine surveillance technology utilized by the US military and the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s (through their CORONA and NAVISTAR programs) to the commercially funded GeoEye and QuickBird satellites adopted by Google.
For example, Kurgan examines a series of satellite images taken in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The photographs (which depict the smouldering remains of the twin towers and billowing smoke plumes) are both shocking in their depiction of the destruction caused yet also somehow mesmerizing to view from above. High-resolution satellite images are one of our most powerful metaphors for the new condition of universality: an all-seeing image, potentially of any point on Earth, remarks Kurgan (p. 131) – a point that chimes with Augé’s (1994: 3) own assertion that our contemporary world view is dominated by the aesthetic of the ‘cinematic long shot’. Yet, the complexity and scale of the 9/11 satellite images eschew our ability to make sense of them. As Kurgan puts it, these images, ‘let us see too much, and hence blind us to what we cannot see, imposing a quiet tyranny of orientation that erases the possibility of disoriented discovery’ (p. 45). Look too closely and the image breaks down into a pixellated mess.
Another project worth touching upon is ‘monochrome landscapes’ – a collection of four high-resolution images that each correspond to a natural landscape under threat by human activity: Alaska, the Atlantic Ocean, the southern desert of Iraq and the rainforests in Cameroon. In the latter of these photographic projects, for example, we are shown the marks of deforestation. Dark lines snake their way through the forest canopy – the result of man-made roads used for logging. Kurgan’s hope, one imagines, is to raise awareness of this changing landscape. However, as fascinating as each of the images are to look at and witness, it is not entirely clear what we do with them or how they enact or mobilize the reader to action, in part because there is no accompanying visual theory to each of the images other than a descriptive overview of their relevance to the author. The blank white Alaskan landscape chosen by Kurgan, for example, is the site both of the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) and a major crude oil drilling operation. This conflict of interest has pitted indigenous populations (who want to preserve the environment) against those of the US government and its goal to secure energy resources. But what of the satellite images themselves and technologies of spatial representation? Very little is said in this regard. Part of the problem with this section is that, by Kurgan’s own admission, these images were displayed as part of an art installation, eschewing any in-depth theoretical analysis beyond a passive gaze. Thus, it is difficult to see how she argues that these projects moved beyond ‘more than a formal aesthetic’ (p. 153). Perhaps the artistic origins of the study do allow a certain licence to present her research as a subjective exercise in meaning making, but it is frustrating at times.
In sum, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics is a fascinating and timely read that offers new perspectives on how we might re-interpret and re-imagine satellite imagery both as a form of political resistance and (more recently) as a scientific tool to direct global environmental policy. The panoply of space-based planetary imagery and GPS technology now available at our fingertips means that maps have become deeply ingrained in our perception of material space. Yet, satellite images from above must be viewed and understood as a layer of mediated reality. Kurgan’s various projects are very interesting and the high-resolution images are captivating to look at. However, the lack of visual theory or thorough acknowledgment of cultural theorists integral to such a cultural history hamper some of the book’s conclusions. Notwithstanding, Kurgan’s research is a useful addition for scholars, students and artists working in the field of Visual Studies, Anthropology and Digital Technology.