In our age of accelerating pixels, bits and bytes, images are acquiring a novel and unique power. By mediating experience, they develop networks between what is real and what is virtual.  As computational barometers and indicators such images link contemporary culture to other forms of knowledge acquisition, including scientific innovation, unpredictable representations and theoretical speculations and conjectures.

 

Remote Sensing refers to current digital technologies that can picture locations that are either toxic or inaccessible to visit. Using state-of-the-art satellite data, remote sensing apparatuses are now employed to computationally picture such spaces. An extension of digital photography, these images garner information electronically to forego onsite investigations. From outlining discrete landmasses to choreographing depictions of planetary heat maps, “being there” is not the primary method for mining data. As geography becomes digitally remapped into data sets, access to territories merge the urban with the rural, the contaminated with the pristine, and even the retreating glacier with the desert, eliciting a world view without political and tribal borders.