ABSTRACT
To perceive environments from a distance requires highly sensitive instruments. Current remote-sensing devices follow the tradition of instruments that have historically privileged the visual sense: from sonar to radar they claim to ‘see’ environmental change, translating digital data into visual imagery. This chapter takes two kinds of remote-sensing practices as a starting point for a discussion of techno-scientific approaches to environmental perception beyond the visual sense: sensing of the ocean floor by sonar on ships and sensing polar cryospheres by radar on satellites. Both technologies collect single measurements into synoptic arrangements that can then be viewed as images. What happens to environmental history if sensory data become the source
and digital data management becomes the practice of making sense of the earthly environments? Our exploration will focus, first, on the materiality of the sensing devices as condition and effect of what becomes visible. How can we understand sensory data and their subsequent presentations as visualizations of earthly environments? Second, we focus on the changed view of the archive as a passage to history. In a time of big data and ubiquitous computing, paired with increasing belief in learning machines and massive data analytics, we need to re-pose questions on the matter of historiography, in terms of its objectivity and situatedness. On the one hand, remote-sensing technologies seem merely to scale-up the mediated relation to nature that scientific and technological investigation adopted. Observing and recoding instruments have long outperformed the potentials of direct sensual experiences of seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting and touching a study object. On the other hand, digital data visualizations can evoke unintended or unanticipated affect. Which nature speaks through the digital archive and communication, and how?
