2022–2023
Convenors:
Lilian Kroth and Amelia Urry
Co-Organisers:
Charlotte Connelly (Curator, Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge) and Dehlia Hannah (Fellow, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen)
Discover more
Scientific knowledge of climate and environment is largely mediated by sensors, whether instruments housed in airplanes and satellites or networked apparati embedded in an environment and accessed by researchers at computer terminals. Remote sensing, therefore, requires inhabiting a space of uncertainty and ambiguity. In this context, ice is often portrayed as exotic and fragile, an endangered element within a disordered climate. It is also a highly sensory material, eliciting strong, sometimes surprising, responses from the sensing body. Coming to terms with ice, then, requires some exploration of the nature and limits of first-hand experience, and the role of the field in producing knowledge, as well as the augmentation of these experiences through instrumentation, imagination, and other sensory practices. By challenging the expectation that icy places must be experienced first and foremost, we will explore the aesthetic, conceptual, and scientific dimensions of the cryosphere as seen from a distance. When ‘going there’ is not an option, how can instruments, imagination, and embodied practices work to span the distance?
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/remote-sensing-exploring-practices-between-the-arts-sciences-and-humanities/
Kroth, Lilian. ‘Remote Sensing and Feminist Critique: Reappropriations of Sensing across Distance’. Environment and Planning F 4, no. 1 (2025): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825241283838.
Kroth, Lilian. ‘Cryo-Criticality. Michel Serres and Modes of Thinking with Ice’. In Michel Serres and the Environmental Humanities, edited by Moritz Ingwersen, Stephanie Posthumus, and Beate Ochsner. London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming 2026.
Kroth, Lilian, and Amelia Urry. ‘Remote Sensing as Method and Material’. Environment and Planning F, no. Special Issue: Remote Sensing as Method and Material (forthcoming 2026).