Can Satellites See Through Clouds? Collaborative Socio-Material Practices for New Infrastructural Imaginaries and Planetary Perspectives
From January 19 to 22, FIBER hosted Part 4 of its Reassemble Lab: The Weathercapes Lab. The Lab broadly explored how the weather works; from the relationship between weather and climate as well as the relationships between weather measurements and the development of contemporary forecasting models and computer technology, and more. Bilyana Palankasova reflects on topics explored during the lab with the following article. In this essay, two instances of creative practices engaged with weather sensing are discussed through a socio-material lens to reflect on the possibilities of emancipation by making the global telecommunication infrastructure visible.
As a response to Fiber’s Weatherscapes Reassemble Lab, I’d like to sketch out a few considerations around creative practices, which resonate with the themes of the lab and share certain commonalities when dealing with technological infrastructure, satellite imaging, sensing technologies, and ecological and geopolitical anxieties. I will consider Sasha Engelman and Sophie Dyer’s Open-Weather project and Afroditis Psarra & Audre Briot’s Listening Space.
Open-weather is a project led by Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann looking at the often nebulous links and tensions between atmospheres, weather systems, and bodies by experimenting with transmission technologies, such as amateur radio, open data, and feminist methods of sensing. The project focuses on perceiving satellite images through DIY (do-it-yourself) radio technologies and includes the delivery of workshops and the publication of how-to guides and critical frameworks. By employing feminist tactics and focusing on open-source, accessible, and amateur technology, the project produces amateur-generated weather data and seeks to demonstrate power dynamics in relation to satellite imagery, transmission technologies, and meteorological data. [1] Open-weather is fundamentally a socially engaged and community-building project and in 2020 the extended network of the project produced the global weather ‘nowcast’. [2]
Listening Space is an ongoing artistic research project by Afroditi Psarra and Audrey Briot which examines transmission ecologies as methods of perceiving the world around us beyond our human abilities and senses. In an effort to understand and reposition poetically visual and auditory information transmitted from outer space, the project uses satellite images as artistic material and deploys performative methods of movement and gesture “as actuators to explore remote sensing.” They consider the human body as an interface for sensing surrounding ecologies. The artists intercepted the NOAA weather satellites’ audio-visual transmissions using Software-Defined-Radio and hand-crafted antennas to explore processes of citizen science. [3] The intercepted signals were knitted into textiles named Satellite Ikatas — a way of physically archiving the detection and decoding process. [4] The project was part of the exhibition Weather Engines which Daphne Dragona, a contributor to the FIBER talks programme, curated alongside Jussi Parikka in Athens in 2022. For FIBER’s Weatherscapes Talks, Dragona presented some ideas, which informed the curatorial framework of Weather Engines and particularly touched on the personal experience of weather — the weather as produced by bodies and the weather as inhabited. [5]
I’d like to speculate on what such critical perspectives on environmental data collection tell us about the ways in which this information is being used, shaped with meaning, and made visible. How could creative experiments with weather and remote sensing influence our understanding and experience of ecological and atmospheric disturbances? In our late Anthropocene discourse, experiencing the weather is the most direct way of experiencing the climate crisis. The present is defined by our vulnerability to extreme weather, which marks a departure from previous conceptions of the world’s ecosystem as harmonious and self-regulating — what the scholar McKenzie Wark describes as the “end of pre-history” or a period marked by “the worldview of an ecology that was self-correcting, self-balancing and self-healing — is dead.” [6] The curator Anselm Franke makes an adjacent point when relating Anthropocene discourse to the end of what modernity was framing as stable (the planet) becoming unstable and “the transcendental humanist subject (of history) beginning to dissolve into post-humanist structures and techno-sociological milieus.” [7] Unpredictable weather is a symptom of the Anthropocene condition and sits in the context of the emergence of a socio-material understanding of the world. What this signals is increased sensitivity to our entanglement with landscapes, atmospheres, and infrastructures and the subsequent changes in the ways in which we perceive the Earth and relate to the weather.
Both Open-Weather and Listening Space recontextualise data transmissions coming from outer space to emancipate the subject from global telecommunication infrastructure and its entanglement with the military-state-corporate apparatus. Through creative and speculative encounters in aesthetics, environments, and politics, these projects deliver a fractal or partial image of their world by enacting a detachment from the global transmission of information through the performance of localisation. In this way, the projects enact embodied, performative, and collective contacts with the global telecommunication infrastructure and produce fragmentary and subjective representations of the atmosphere and transmission ecologies. The outcomes, taking various shapes, among which remotely sensed and produced satellite images, emerged in a collaborative socio-material entanglement and are artefacts brought into cultural infrastructure which also enabled alternative (and DIY) telecommunication infrastructure.
I wonder if these fractal and localised artefacts carry a subversive potential toward the universalising logic of the world? The universalising logic is closely related to the first satellite images of the Earth. When Earthrise, the first photograph of the Earth, was taken from Apollo 8 in 1968, it brought on a kind of “world perspective” of socio-politically unified human beings living together on Earth. [8] This perspective is widely criticised because while it suggests harmony between all living on Earth by overcoming differences, it has been interpreted as apolitical and detaching images from their context. Art historian T.J. Demos argues that such universalising image relies on “an antipolitical excision of disagreement and conflict, the acknowledgement and negotiation of which is the fundamental condition of democracy.” Therefore, we need to think of and conceptualise images of the Earth, not as detached from individual or collective experience and representing some sense of totality but to challenge the idea of homogenous responsibility and universalising discourse.
Through artistic experiments, such as Open-weather and Listening Space, creative practitioners turn the weather into a medium and expand our understanding of meteorological data. In these contexts, creating DIY infrastructure for remote sensing reframes experiences of the weather by interjecting the global information infrastructure supported by machine vision of satellite networks. This interjection creates a productive space for thinking about representations of the Earth, particularly in the context of the Planetary, by way of human interruption into a machine-machine interaction of data processing and image creation (satellite footage) — Lukáš Likavčan refers to such images as “synthetic”.
Ultimately, both projects enact a translation of planetary information by challenging the perceived immateriality of global telecommunication infrastructure. This act of emancipation and subjective experience of weather data and planetary images is performed through the introduction of an alternative technology — the DIY antennae — and the subsequent reclaiming of agency as actors interacting with atmospheric data and questioning the power routes in and out of satellite networks and meteorological data.
Bilyana Palankasova is a researcher and curator of contemporary art and technology, pursuing an AHRC (SGSAH) funded PhD at the University of Glasgow, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and NEoN Digital Arts. Her research focuses on festivals, methods of commissioning and curating, and value creation. Bilyana holds MLitt in Curatorial Practice from The Glasgow School of Art, MSc in Modern & Contemporary Art from The University of Edinburgh, and MA in Digital Media and History of Art from the University of Glasgow.
