Sensing Landscape as a Media Object: A Case Study in Kandahar, Afghanistan

• In Event: Ways of Knowing the Digital Anthropocene (Sensing and Seeing)

Abstract

To make a map is to give order to the world—to give it a “reasonableness which it doesn’t necessarily possess”, as William Boyd notes in his novel on wartime authority, An Ice-Cream War. By making the world appear rational and reasoned, maps describe more than the biophysical constitution of territory, revealing instead an obsession with exactness and measurement; opening up a biography of disciplined sensing, observation, and knowledge.

Long represented as an imaginative object, landscape represents the many aesthetic parameters of human consciousness. From the realistic to the surreal, landscape is as evocative as it is political. But in the age of a computational planet, what does it mean to sense a landscape as a digital media object? This paper opens up a view into the surreal aesthetics of a politically fraught space—representing landscape as a digital and virtual reality sensed by virtual means, and corded a language that aligns human perception to more-than-human technologies of sensing.

Following a series of landscape visualizations created with remotely sensed data by the author under training and conversation with archaeologists, the research reflects on remote sensing processes for understanding the historical significance of militarized archaeological landscapes in Afghanistan; highlighting a geopolitical context. It scratches the surface of remotely-sensed data to reveal a peculiar ontology--a dataset that is not an image, but is certainly image-like. This liminality renders the notion of landscape more elusive than ever before. What it does leave us with are only the material traces of the ambient—the pixel, the point-cloud, pulses of light, scan lines, resolutions and densities. These mediated perceptions go on to serve as concrete evidence as well form scientifically-informed speculations about sites that are physically inaccessible to fieldwork. Array-based remote sensing has been on the rise since the late 20th century, influencing knowledge cultures across a wide spectrum--from geology, military planning, archaeology to landscape architecture, humanitarian activism, and artistic practices. This wide spectrum of uses is enabled partly by the declassification of datasets as well as the proliferation of sensing technologies, enabling myriad visual interpretations of a single landscape. The digital and virtual landscape is a computable surface that opens up imaginations of territory, topography, terrain and topology with a nuanced concept of materiality; one that is in stark relief to tangibility and physicality. The entanglement of aesthetics and objective knowledge mark this foray into remotely discovering Southern Afghanistan, through a landscape of data where the analyst digs like an archaeologist, but into virtual soils, revealing the politics and aesthetics of remote sensing.

Note: This article is based on an ongoing research by the author component that is part of their scholarly research as well as a media arts practice involving a three-channel video installation with a VR component. The research is a product of conversations and hands-on training with archaeologists at the Center for Ancient Middle-Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) at the University of Chicago.

Author

• Saadia Mirza, The University Of Chicago