A Civic View from Above

Aerial images are many times considered an objective, scientific representation that requires professional expertise for its decoding. Critics have portrayed the photographic view from above as a “gaze from nowhere”, meaning, that it is presumed to have no author or creator, a universal gaze that has no politics and leaves no space for interpretation.

In the past two decades we are witnessing the distribution, decentralization and commercialization of location-based technologies, such as GPS, drones, digital mapping and satellite imagery, making these tools and imageries, to a certain extent, publicly available. This transformation, it can be said, is an unprecedented politicization of the view from above. In this course we will explore this paradigmatic shift, theoretically and experimentally. We will examine the change in our perception of the aerial view, the way it reshapes the airspace, and how different tools allow to participate in constructing a new kind of “atmospheric politics”.

The course will combine theory and practice, reading and experimenting - with aerial tools and images – developing a critical understanding of how politics is materially embedded in technological tools and exploring the creative and imaginative possibilities of a civic view from above.