2025–2026
Principal investigator:
Lilian Kroth
Keywords:
data literacy, ice humanities, drawing, view from above, aesthetic methods, satellite, cryosphere
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Drawing has been a crucial and often underacknowledged method in research processes dating back centuries. Recent research has demonstrated the impact of drawing, an activity typically associated with artistic practices, across the history of the sciences and humanities, giving cause to understand it as a critical tool and research method. The project mobilizes drawing as a cognitive and embodied practice to critically assess and make sense of the histories, impacts and narratives of the satellites’ ‘eyes in the sky’; and particularly those dealing with difficult-to-decipher icy environments.
Through an engagement with research and in-situ perspectives of cryosphere ecologies, views of and visual vocabulary for icy environments from above, and satellite ground stations, the process of drawing will be used as a methodological heuristic for understanding how a satellite ‘sees’. In the interdisciplinary research field around remote sensing, to which this project will contribute, different visualization processes and strategies are key. Drawing will be mobilized in multiple registers, including abstract and figurative drawings; diagrams of spectral data; the stitches and gaps of composite satellite images; drawings of the instruments involved in remote sensing; and drawings of the metaphors with which scientists and the public speak about satellite vision. Engaging with the question of what it means to see ice like a satellite, the aim is to bring an unconventional yet promising research method into play, to reveal and expose hidden knowledges, and trace the relations between different ways of seeing in the field of remote sensing. The aim of the project is to support and strengthen aesthetic approaches to satellite data literacy, in order to contextualize and make graspable the forms of technologically-mediated seeing that permeate contemporary social life.
Drawing will be used to bring to the foreground an aspect of remote sensing which is often merely implicit or even overlooked. A better understanding of how satellite images are ‘made’ and what they show is made possible by drawing out, literally and metaphorically, the gaps and idealisations on which the composition of images are predicated; methods of temporal and spatial interpretation; or ways in which a line in the ice is assessed as shadow, crack, river or border. Drawing can be a tool for “grounding” satellite vision, for creating visualizations of the possibilities and limits of satellites’ perception – indeed, for making the invisible in satellite images visible, and showing the density of processes by which the visualizable becomes visible.
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).
Kroth, Lilian, and Amelia Urry. ‘Edges of the Ice: Aerial Views and Frontier Imaginaries’. In The Aerial Turn. On the Conquest of the Air and Its Impact on the City, the Territory and the Planet, edited by Matteo Vegetti, 133–51. Mendrisio Academy Press, 2025. https://doi.org/10.48686/8kym-7z38.
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.