Geography
Derek McCormack, Professor, Geography, University of Oxford, United-Kingdom

Remote sensing is perhaps most often understood as a technical practice involving the acquisition of information about an object or site without direct contact, and often from a significant distance. The most familiar example of remote sensing is satellite imaging of the earth’s surface. Such images are very useful. Among other things they can highlight changing patterns of land use in ways that are impossible with ground-based survey methods. Remote sensing can also be undertaken from airplanes, and today drones provide another highly mobile and relatively cheap platform for remote sensing.

All forms of remote sensing were anticipated by balloon flight, via which the first remotely sensed images of the earth were taken. And it was while researching a specific episode of balloon flight – the failed 1897 Andrée Expedition to the North Pole – that I began to think about remote sensing. One of the aims of the expedition was to remotely sense the Arctic via photography. But the expedition disappeared. Its remains, including bodies, photos, and diaries, were discovered 33 years later. While working with some of these materials I began to imagine a different version of remote sensing, one involving sensing the afterlife of the expedition through the capacity to be affected by its remains.

This prompted me to reflect further on the problems and possibilities of remote sensing and to revisit various criticisms of it that circulated within cultural geography, the part of the discipline in which I work. As an assemblage of technologies and techniques remote sensing seems to emphasize elevated vision as the primary sense through which space is grasped. When I was undertaking my graduate studies there was a strong critique within cultural geography of this way of apprehending space. Though purportedly technically neutral, it exemplified the allure of a ‘view from nowhere’, performing the kind of ‘God-Trick’ of which Donna Haraway has written. In light of some of these problems, cultural geographers and others argued for the importance of forms of sensing that emphasized the situated experience of embodiment, and that affirmed presence (or at least co-presence) and proximity. Crucially, these forms of sensing were not reducible to vision but included touch, sound, and smell.

However, this emphasis on situatedness, immersion, and presence is not so straightforwardly opposed to the idea of remote sensing outlined above. In fact, all sensing involves a degree of remoteness that complicate any dream of presence. By this I mean that no single body can grasp fully another, and that no two bodies are ever fully co-present or co-incident. There always remains something withdrawn – or remote – of one body that cannot be apprehended or acquired by another body. Sensing another body always involves a form of remoteness at whatever the scale we are considering, even if it concerns two dancers moving closely together, a claim that has relevance for how we might think about some of the activities at the Performance Lab.

This version of remote sensing is simultaneously spatial and temporal. Spatially, it is a matter of how bodies affect (or move) and are affected (or moved) by other bodies that are always remote. This matter becomes more complicated of course by the digital mediation and the extension of the capacities of bodies to sense and be sensed by others at a distance. Temporally, remote sensing reminds us that we are affected by bodies no longer present. We sense the influence and force of bodies that are no longer alive, that exist only as memories, or as artefactual traces. We sense the wake of their affective lives and deaths. Crucially, we are also affected by the bodies we used to be and the bodies we might become, bodies with which we can never have physical or direct contact, and bodies we can therefore only ever sense remotely.

Cite this item: Derek McCormack, “Remote sensing”, Performascope: Interdisciplinary Lexicon of Performance and Research-Creation, Grenoble: Université Grenoble Alpes, 2021, [online]: http://performascope.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/en/detail/177577