Sensing in and Beyond the Digital Anthropocene

The imaging of landscape represents the many aesthetic parameters of human consciousness. From the realistic to the surreal, landscape is as evocative as it is political. But with the advent of remotely sensed data, many of which supersedes human capacities of vision, what does it mean to experience a landscape as a digital media object? This visual and textual research opens up a view into the surreal aesthetics of a politically fraught landscape as a digital and virtual reality. It features images as an ethnography of ‘factual’ image-making–revealing the historically and culturally situated nature of image production–in this case, remotely-sensed images of the most conflicted landscapes during the US-led War in Afghanistan between 2010-2014. These images were computed and created as part of ethnographic research under training with archaeologists performing remote discovery; a branch of archaeology that uses digital remote sensing to document vulnerable and threatened landscapes that are inaccessible due to physical and usually, political obstacles. Through an ethnographic approach towards computation, digital cartography, and modeling, I show how landscapes imaged with the digital data offer room for speculative and counter-narratives through the two aspects of liminality and transduction. Thus, whilst not an archaeologist myself, these images are part of my own creation and research through learning and applying geospatial methods for archaeological research. While my main methods and objectives have followed archaeologists’ computational methods with remotely sensed data such as terrain modelling, topographical analysis, NDVI analysis, and probability mapping, I also incorporate interdisciplinary insights from: 1) remote sensing engineers and experts at the Swiss Institute of Technology ETH Zürich and the Geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago, and 2) artistic experiments with the data in Virtual Reality to visualize and experience terrain models using the programming environment called “Field” by the new media art collective called OpenEndedGroup. In this way, the project speaks to the genre of ‘para-ethnography’ – a collaborative mode of ethnographic research that involves “shared, discovered, and negotiated critical sensibilities” (Marcus 2000).