Building a counter-image: Critical approaches to aerial view

Abstract

Throughout history, seeing and perceiving the environment has been one of the most outstanding efforts of humanity. Looking from above, as a privileged way of seeing, has turned into a boundary-drawing action for political organizations, surveillance studies, and urban planning with the advent of photography and aviation technologies. When the multi-layered relationship of seeing and knowing is handled through the city and space, it also paves the way for a problematic form of representation in which seeing, showing, and hiding are intertwined. In the 20th century, aerial photography moved away from the human body and suggested a way of seeing from above, resulting in the operationalization of urban space. As the gaze itself becomes an apparatus of control, following the invisible and ambiguous part of these operational images reveals the knowledge production machine with counter-imagination possibilities. This study, which seeks fractures in those images with examples from various political, architectural, and artistic practices, tries to redefine the image and the urban space it sees as an intervention area. Tracing the fractures in the disembodied, commanding, and abstracted intentions of looking from above, in these fractures, the spatial and temporal potentials built by artistic subjectivity are questioned. Hiding and tracing, as a ‘counter-action,’ at the asymmetrical threshold between visibility and invisibility, it can pave the way for enduring, resisting, or coexisting with/through the violent relationship between aerial vision technologies and everyday life on the ground.