From Above

97 Pages·2016·21.78 MB·English

by  Liv Brissach

From Above

The Vertical Perspective in Ursula Biemann’s ‘Remote
Sensing’ (2001)

Liv Brissach

Master Thesis Presented at The Department of Philosophy, Classics,
History of Art and Ideas, The Faculty of Humanities

Supervised by Professor Ina Blom
UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

December 2016
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From Above
The Vertical Perspective in Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing (2001)

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© Liv Brissach

2016

From Above: The Vertical Perspective in Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing (2001)

Liv Brissach

http://www.duo.uio.no

Print: Mail Boxes etc., Oslo/Reprosentralen, University of Oslo

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Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor, Ina Blom, for all her input, intellectual
inspiration, and for a gentle push into a field of research that has sparked my interest also
beyond this thesis. I am grateful for Ursula Biemann’s helpful replies even to what must have
seemed like irrelevant technical questions. I am also very grateful for my co-student Susan
Falkenås’ careful, critical, and wise reading of the manuscript. Finally, thanks are due to the
vibrant and welcoming milieu of the media aesthetics seminar group at the Department of
Media and Communications for providing a fertile ground from which to grow.

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Abstract
This thesis investigates how vertical perspectives and the satellite technologies that produce
them are situated in Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing (2001).
In this 53-minute long video essay, a range of satellite images, animations of
satellites, and other found footage that relates to satellite operativity can be found. These
images are juxtaposed with up to four other frames in split-screen presentations, and
sometimes have script layered on top. In between, on top of, and next to these images, we see
Biemann’s own footage from interviews she conducted and locations to which she travelled.
Via all these images – some moving and some still – the video essay investigates the multiple
trajectories and motivations of women who migrate to work in sex industries globally.
The way in which the video essay utilises found satellite imagery and highlights
important aspects about satellite operativity sits very timely within the increasing visibility of
vertical perspectives in the form of drone and satellite imagery and virtual visualisations of
the earth (Google Earth). The ubiquity of machines that offer perspectives from above calls
for critical terms which can effectively address such visions of the world, the way in which
they are produced, and the ends they serve. These terms, I argue, differ greatly from those
found in the earlier perspectival paradigms in art history – in which linear perspective has
occupied a dominant role – as elaborated by Erwin Panofksy, Hubert Damisch, and others.
Following Donna Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges” both as a method and
theoretical framework, this thesis argues that Biemann’s Remote Sensing situates vertical
perspectives and the technologies that produce them in a technological framework as well as
within the specific cultural and political context: notably that of women in parts of Southeast
Asia, South Korea, and Eastern and Central Europe, who migrate to work in the sex industry.
In this way the specific forms of satellite vision presented by Biemann’s video essay are
made pertinent in relation to a feminist analysis of migrant women’s labour. This a result of
negotiating and reimagining the possible conceptualisations of satellite vision between border
restriction, global mobility, and the visibility of these women. Instead of perpetuating a
rhetoric that situates satellite vision as a penetrating gaze which offers infinitely mobile and
all-powerful surveillance, the video essay offers technical details which instead present
satellite vision as embodied, vulnerable, and partial. From this position, the situated
knowledge of the satellite – in all its partiality – can be stitched together with the interviews
with current and former sex workers, women’s rights and anti-trafficking activists, as well as
live camera action scenes from the daily activities of these women into a counter-geography.
This counter-geography gives visibility to aspects of globalisation which often go under the
radar: clandestine networks, illicit border-crossing circuits, as well as some of the multiple
grey areas between being forced into sex work and choosing sex work.
This counter-geography operates in highly experimental ways which embrace the
overall difficulty of representing clandestinity, grey areas, and migrant subjects. As such, I
argue that Biemann exploits and reimagines the limits and possibilities of the video essay by
a range of postproduction effects that destabilise the types of objective truth claims often
associated with traditional documentaries, as well as by multiplying, fracturing and
experimenting with the screen space. Concerning the latter, I argue that her use of vertical
perspectives along with split-screens and composite images disrupts the rationalising of space
associated with conquest and colonization.

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1
1.1 Remote Sensing (2001, 53 minutes) ..................................................................................... 1
1.2 Other works .................................................................................................................................. 5
1.3 Research history ......................................................................................................................... 8
1.4 Context ........................................................................................................................................... 9
1.5 Research questions ................................................................................................................. 16
1.6 Theoretical framework .......................................................................................................... 16
1.7 Method and thesis structure ................................................................................................ 24
2 Horizontal vs. vertical perspective ............................................................................... 27
2.1 The God-trick ............................................................................................................................ 37
3 Situated satellites ............................................................................................................... 41
3.1 The Structure of the work ..................................................................................................... 44
3.2 Embodiment .............................................................................................................................. 49
3.3 Technical specificity and differences of temporality .................................................. 53
3.4 Partiality ..................................................................................................................................... 58
3.5 Seeing with satellites .............................................................................................................. 62
4 The video essay as a web of situated knowledges ................................................... 66
4.1 Hybridity ..................................................................................................................................... 66
4.2 The video essay in the digital age ....................................................................................... 70
4.3 Webs of situated knowledges .............................................................................................. 72
4.4 The multiplication of the screen space ............................................................................ 74
5 Concluding Remarks .......................................................................................................... 77
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 79
Illustrations ................................................................................................................................... 87

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1 Introduction

On the one hand, Ursula Biemann’s Remote Sensing (2001) is concerned with the social and
personal micro-perspectives of lived lives in times of conflict; on other, the video essay
throws us into the complex terrain of satellite technology, remote sensing, and border
security. Via these technologies there seems to be a particular emphasis on the perspective
from above, or what I choose to call vertical perspective so as to distinguish it from the linear
perspective which has occupied a dominant role in art history.1 This thesis is an investigation
of how Remote Sensing (2001) presents and situates vertical perspectives and the
technologies that produce them. Accordingly, it is also an investigation of how the
pervasiveness of visual technologies that offer and inform new visions of the world may call
for new conceptualisations of perspective.

Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist, curator and theorist. Her earlier video essays (1999 – 2005)
have been focused on gendered and ethnic geographies and politics of mobility, locating her
points of interest in the grey zones and borderlands produced by the intersections of nations,
globalised capitalist interests, surveillance technologies, and the movement of bodies and
goods across these borderlands. From this early body of video works, this thesis will look
specifically and mainly at Remote Sensing (2001), and while extrapolating from some of
Biemann’s other works in order to further investigate these topics.

1.1 Remote Sensing (2001, 53 minutes)

Satellites, satellite images and the technologies of “remote sensing” – a general term for data
collection from aerial, stratospheric or ionospheric distances – are images that construct this
video essay. These images are mobilised and activated through varying and experimental
strategies throughout the work. There is a variety of satellite images that occupy the whole or
parts of the sometimes split-screen. In some instances, these satellite images are commented
on by the voice-over, other times they are presented in relation to other types of images, for

1 I borrow the term vertical perspective from Hito Steyerl and Eyal Weizmann, which they conceptualise as
distinct from horizontal and linear perspective. See Hito Steyerl, “The Politics of the Vertical Perspective,” in
her The Wretched of the Screen, (Sternberg Press, 2012); Eyal Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality,”
OpenDemocracy, 23.04.02, accessed 15.11.14, https://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-
politicsverticality/article_801.jsp.
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