N O W

I explored requesting a new satellite image of Durnford quarry to capture the 5x5 pixel blanket I left there from space. 

Pixel installation at Durnford Quarry. 

Demonstration of physicality of digital cartography in area of land use that contributes to satellite manufacture. 

Aims to clarify sense of scale, both for the vastness of human resource excavation and for spacial resolution of satellite imagery.

RapidEye 5x5m pixel

On Mines.

“ Modern humans tend to naturalise the ground, seeing the terrestrial platform beneath their feet as some immutable and natural product of geological processes working over unimaginable time horizons” 

The Anthropocene: The age in which human agency shapes land, soil and the very geology of the Earth- as well as air, atmosphere, biosphere and ocean- more powerful than any other ‘natural’ force. 

“ Humans channel and reshuffle Earth minerals on a scale and with consequences that rival major geological events” Smudge Studio

Wallasea- Thames Estuary: Island the size of City of London being created as a bird reserve from Crossrail excavation material.

“ Archaeology as a practice is about signatures of the visible” Maja Gori

“ Extraction sustains our society... [however] as the world population becomes more urban and more specially removed from the landscapes that supply it’s raw materials and energy needs... our reliance on remotely extracted natural resources only continues to increase, while out relationship to the landscapes of extraction recedes ever further from daily view.” Stephanie Carlisle and Nicolas Pevzner

“ Only very rarely have the subterranean resources that have so often driven colonialist and imperial campaigns have been mapped for popular attention. Beyond the professional worlds of geologists or mining engineers, vertical sections or diagrams of colonists and imperialists efforts to reach deep lying minerals and fossil fuels are remarkably rare.”

“ The wider extractive economy remains neglected in many political and ecological debates. These often display what has been called “surface bias” stemming from the dominant use of flat cartography as the means of illustration, visualisation and imagination.” Edward Said called this Western colonialism’s “cartographic impulse”

“ Geographical engagements with the relations between power and space have consistently focussed on ‘surface imaginations’ of horizontal space at the expense of ‘vertical’ enquiries into power over subterranean matter”

“ The evolution of the human race is directly linked to their consumption of mined resources.”

“ Crucial but unusual invisible worlds of mining”

Deep ore pits in west Australia: ‘ The silent twin: the void where a land-form once was. These are the dislocated resource sites that support the world that we know” Unknown Fields 

Mines are often controlled by multinationals- use vast amounts of water and energy. Huge polluters. Run and owned by super-rich elites. Often corrupt alliances. Evidence of violations of human rights. Such companies leave a wake of catastrophic social and environmental devastation in their wake.

On Satellites

“ The view from a satellite makes possible a Copernican revolution in outlook. . . . Ever since the early sixties an inverted astronomy has thus come into being, looking down from space onto the earth rather than from the ground up into the skies.” Peter Sloterdijk 1990

“ We live in a satellite enabled age. The satellites flying above are not abstract agents of science, but part of the critical life support system we depend on, every day.” UK Gov. Satellites application catapult

“ Once aloft, satellites become distant, enigmatic and quite literally ‘unearthly’” Jim Oberg

“ Every time verticality and horizontality blend together and discourses lose informal gravity, there is need for the arts” Dario Solman

[Satellites have] “invisibility and apparent removal from worlds of earthly politics”

“ Such a small range of direct experience fails to equip us with the skills to disentangle the politics of this huge aerial assemblage” 

“ Regimes of power organised through satellites and other outer space systems are interwoven with production of violence, inequality and injustice on the terrestrial surface.” Daniel Sage

“ political geography of inner and outer space”

“ Prosthetic Eyes”

“ It is necessary to see satellite imaging as a highly biased form of visualising or even simulating the Earth’s surface rather than some objective or apolitical transmission of it’s ‘truth’” - where maps are now known to be subject to bias, satellite images are still assumed to present a simple, direct and truthful correlation of Earth. (e.g WMD facilities presented by US gov to justify Iraq war) 

“ Today the aerial view, the image of everywhere, is everywhere” 

“ the ‘scale-jumping’ possibilities of Google Earth force us to revisit the politics of the ‘aerial’- the ‘Gods Eye’”

“ Satellites and satellite vision are absolutely pivotal to this new sense of vertical free fall that attend this new age” Hito Steyerl.

Despite it’s flexibility, the cultural and political bias of Google Earth are not hard to spot. As you restart the programme, the system defaults to a US-centred view. 

“ The geographies of exploitation and repression became startlingly clear in full-colour, high-res imagery.” 

“ Examine cartography as a co-evolutionary process of society and technology”

“ Map users in the 21st Century will witness changes in the visualisation and application of spacial information”

“ Google increasingly adds functionalities that aim to make an online replica of the world” 

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it” Jean Beadrillard.

“Maps came to define the Empire itself, to give it territorial integrity and it’s basic existence. The empire exists because it can be mapped, the meaning of empire is inscribed into each map.”

Maps are “unstable signifiers, heavily imbued with the cultural perspectives of the society that created them”

“ The satellite or aerial photograph serves as an index of a specific moment in time and a representation of that ontological materiality captured by the photographic technology”

“ Common association of machine authorship with satellite/ Google Earth maps produces a distance from subjectivity and emphasises objectivity.”

“ The technological gaze of aerial and satellite imagery- the essence of Google Earth- has a long history with war and imperialism and subsequently has  a historical relationship in the way maps delineate ‘us’ versus ‘them’ as well as defining ‘our territory’”

I have been struggling to bring the project together as a whole as opposed to small studies and research topics that are only loosely connected. 

When looking at all the various studies with a friend, we discussed a book that spoke of ‘Inverted Astronomy’, where instead of looking into space from the Earth, you look at the Earth from Space using satellites.

Collection of mineral samples. 

Boron from Rio Tinto Borax mine. I have admired this mine from Google Earth for a very long time! 

Live satellite orbit paths, for each satellite that would be visible overhead in a dark sky.

MINERAL / MINE

close ups of mines on Google Earth replicate the aesthetics of the mineral that comes from that mine

26 TRIPLETS

26 minerals that go into building satellites

26 quarries, one for each mineral

a 5x5 area made from mylar space blankets. This is the spacial resolution of RapidEye satellites used by Google Earth for their satellite imagery. 

SATELLITE LAUNCH + MINING

drawing a parallel to how precious minerals are extracted from the ground to make satellites which then are used to photograph the Earth.