Satellite Landscapes by Jenny Odell
What are “Satellite Landscapes?” Silently hurling around the Earth is an unimaginable number of satellite-mounted cameras, each collaborating with the other to compose a highly detailed, constantly updated rendering of the Earth’s surface, thereby forming an accidental sensing megastructure. While the first picture of the Earth taken from the Moon may have destabilized many at the time (namely Martin Heidegger, claiming that, because of it, “the uprooting of human beings is [...] taking place”), the massive sensing project that I am here describing seems to have received limited criticism – rather, to have been accepted acritically by many. California-based artist Jenny Odell, who refers to herself as an “archaeologist of the present,” takes into exam the massive dataset being produced by these machines with the intent of establishing a “humanity” arising out of this project: “The view from a satellite is not a human one, nor is it one we were ever really meant to see. But it is precisely from this inhuman point of view that we are able to read our own humanity, in all of its tiny, repetitive marks upon the face of the earth.” Counterintuitively, Odell does not turn to cityscapes or old villages to trace a history of “humanity” through architectural examples, but instead turns her attention to spaces that humans designed to be outside of our territorial, cultural and psychological experience on Earth: container ports, water treatment plants, power stations, and data centers. How exactly can we understand these spaces as “human” when we have worked hard to exclude them from the urban collective imaginary? When asked about this, the artist does not have much more to say other than that the sight of these structures proves to be unsettling because the latter speak to an “environmental irresponsibility” covered by an illusion of stability played out by us and supported by these infrastructures. However, I argue that, by reading these artworks through the lenses of Yuk Hui’s theories on ontogenesis and what he calls “inorganic organicity,” the reader will gain a better understanding of the value that Jenny Odell’s “Satellite Landscapes” hold.
Before focusing on the artworks in question, let us trace a brief genealogy of the infrastructures that Odell takes into exam. Yuk Hui’s concept of ontogenesis will here prove to be useful, and let me explain why: in his work on ontogenesis, Yuk Hui frames the question in terms of the uncanny, telling us that objects hold an intrinsic “hiddenness” that helps them “reveal something beyond the phenomenal experience” when an observer comes in contact with an uncanny situation. In this context, the uncanniness of infrastructures hidden from the public may be understood most simply in the social sense of its opaque operations: one could argue that viewers feel a conspiratorial force threatening their experience because of their inchoate understanding of the machine’s operations. Certainly Bernard Stiegler would argue this, given his views on transindividuation (that wouldn’t prove too interesting in this case, given the artist herself doesn’t seem to have grand ideas on the posthuman implications of her artworks); however, Yuk Hui has pointed out time and again that he believes there to be a “missing element” in Stiegler’s theory of transindividuation: “tertiary protention.”
In his text “Recursivity and Contingency,” Yuk Hui devotes a chapter to what he calls the “Organizing Inorganic:” here, he is interested in defining an organism’s agency. To understand what is, in Jenny Odell’s “Satellite Landscapes,” that makes them act as agents in our understanding of the structures represented, and from what might derive an alternate sense of uncanniness that is not merely guided by our ignorance of the machines’ operations, we have to turn to Yuk Hui’s model of “computational hermeneutics.”
Yuk Hui’s mission is to constitute a “computational hermeneutics” in order to explain how signification can be part of the event of contingency in the age of technical systematization. His thinking on the manner is based on what he calls “tertiary protention,” namely an anticipation of future events based on the mediation conducted by an intelligent agent. Hui says that this agency can apply to artworks, thereby distancing himself from a tradition of aesthetics. What this means for our examination of “Satellite Landscapes” is that, in our uncanny encounter with megastructures whose logics seem to exclude us, Odell’s artwork is actively reorganizing our understanding of these structures. In doing so, it is not only rendering these places visible, but also valorizing their operations. While a partial understanding of these machines’ operations may undeniably put us into a state of unease, what makes these works uncanny is the direct representation of their otherwise hidden influence on the ways in which we live our day-to-day lives. Our lives are directly shaped and dependent on the machines represented, and our sense of reality as a metastable system is put into question, along with our right to live. Not only do we come in contact with a logic that does not deem our existence as necessary, we are confronted with the fact that our existence is contingentially dependent on these machines’ operations. In short, we are confronted with our own ontogenesis.
Not only can we see ourselves reflected in Jenny Odell’s “Satellite Landscapes,” we are confronted with the precarity of our existence through its functionality in a dimension that already excludes us or, at best, sees us as complementary. For Yuk Hui, an artwork derives its power from an intelligent interplay with indeterminacy and articulation; these are what make the artwork a formal situation, and, in turn, shape its ambiguity. Here, the artwork holds a tremendous power because its indeterminacy is coupled with such a crude articulation of all the different systems and ensembles that silently keep us alive and, most importantly, because its ambiguity concerns our future as a species.
FRANCESCO FONTANA is a junior at Gallatin studying new advancements in information theory and its effects on the built environment. He is also affiliated with NYU Shanghai’s Interactive Media Arts department and is part of the Gallatin STAC Research team.
