Transformations Journal issue #37

Orbiting otherwise: alternative approaches to satellites

Since the first experiments with satellite technologies in the 1950s and ‘60s, the use of satellites for telecommunications, global positioning and remote sensing has grown into a vast multinational enterprise. Rooted in military applications, satellite data is now a fact of the everyday, incorporated into GPS and mobile devices, displayed on weather maps and apps, and accessible online in many forms. Through active and passive remote sensing, and radar, lidar and multispectral imaging, satellite data also underpins a very large portion of global climate research today.

But this apparent ease of access and the quotidian nature of satellite data today begs the question of alternative uses and inquiries we can make of and through satellite data and infrastructure. How can creative engagements with satellite technologies critique their function in scientific or military operations? How can art and creative fabrication escape or reconfigure the enframing of the human organon by the all-pervasive seeing-eye of satellite technology? This enormous technical apparatus is a tangible reminder that in the age of the Anthropocene our impact on Earth extends many thousands of kilometres into space; how might humanities and social science scholars respond to the existence of this orbital infrastructure? What new ways of sensing and thinking do satellites provide?

This issue of Transformations invites scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences to reflect on new ways of understanding and using satellite infrastructure. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

- New artistic uses of satellite data
- Hacking Google Earth for critical purposes
- Use of satellite data by Traditional Owners
- Multispectral imaging and its implications
- Privacy, secrecy and the “other night sky”
- Reconfigurations of space and territory
- Transnational, regulatory and cultural contexts
- Liveness and immediacy
- Space Junk, debris and the Anthropocene in space
- Algorithmic governmentality and biopolitics in orbit

))) Abstracts (200-400 words) are due 15th November 2021, with a view to submit articles by 1st March 2022.
))) Abstracts should be forwarded to: editor@transformationsjournal.org
))) View Transformations online: http://www.transformationsjournal.org