Sensing the Earth

This interview is part of Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series between Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties.

To my mind, one of the most acute and heartbreaking neologisms of recent years is the word “solastalgia,” describing the grief and estrangement one feels in the face of environmental devastation. It joins terms like “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” in the attempt to put words to the feeling of witnessing the climate crisis, but solastalgia — like its ghost reference, nostalgia — is more absence than presence. It’s the sort of homesickness you get from seeing your home become sick. The word was coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht after he drove past a series of open-cut mines, peering into open wounds so vast and deep they are visible from space. 

Which is to say, they are visible in satellite images taken from space, courtesy of the remote sensors on board hundreds of satellites circling earth. These satellites don’t take pictures so much as capture electromagnetic radiation, picking up and visualizing information about changes to the earth’s surface. These images, this technology of seeing — so rich in information, so massively zoomed out in scale — can add to the sense of debilitation and dread we feel witnessing the beginning of environmental collapse. Or, per Agnes Cameron, satellite images can be used to more deeply understand what’s happening to our environment and to articulate what needs to be done about it. That latter step is important. “One can be constantly seeing and the seeing is not enough,” she says.

Agnes Cameron is an electrical engineer turned hardware and software developer, as well as an artist and educator. She’s currently a fellow at Bellingcat, where she’s assembling resources to help journalists use open-source satellite imagery in investigative reporting. She also teaches her students about how satellite imagery can be used to understand the climate and other humanitarian crises. She works as one-fourth of the research studio Foreign Objects, and her work more widely deals with simulation, distributed knowledge, and infrastructural systems.

I first met Agnes a few years ago, when I edited a lovely essay of hers on category theory, a topic I admittedly had no interest in until Agnes showed me how the mathematical field offers a framework for fundamentally reimagining societal structures. She does the same here for satellite imagery — turns the technology on its head, makes a case for its liberatory potential when placed in the right hands, and shows how this data offers new vantage points from which to see some of humanity’s largest and hardest problems. Agnes talks fast, her mind is so fun to follow, her enthusiasm hard not to catch, and she’s convincing on the idea that technology and data, used properly, can be tools for hope, not dread.

Meg: I’ll start us off with a question we’ve been asking everyone. What have you been growing lately? This could be plants, ideas, projects — any way you want to take it. 

Agnes: It’s funny, the first thing that springs to mind is that I’m currently in the final stages of helping my students prepare their degree show. I work as a technician in an art school’s  computing department. My job in this degree show has been to tend to our clutch of Mac Minis. We have 10 of them and they’re always really unreliable, so for the past two weeks I’ve been doing all this configuration stuff, talking to the students, and updating a spreadsheet to keep track of these machines. There’s something that feels very nurturing about it and very sweet. [laughs] 

Meg: [laughs] That’s great. In this interview series, we’re exploring “the intersection of networked and natural ecologies.” I’m curious what comes to mind when you think of that overlap. Where and how do you see networked/digital ecologies intersecting with the natural world?

Agnes: The way I often think about digital technology is that it’s this thing that purports not to be physical, but which is actually super, super physical, with all of these physical constraints and relationships. When I think about the overlaps of networked technologies and ecologies, what I’m most interested in are the ways we can use technological tools of scientific inquiry properly and with political agency. How can we develop technology in a way that will help us with these huge climate questions we're facing? 

I find satellite imaging very interesting from this perspective, as a technology for seeing and developing ways of understanding how our climate is changing and how our world is put together. But I also think there’s an over-indexing that happens with technologies of seeing — it’s one thing to see something, and then another to act on it. There’s the potential to provide this incredibly sophisticated, deep, multifaceted commentary on the ways that the world is changing and how we need to deal with that. But the actual political will and motivation to act on it is another matter entirely. I’m increasingly interested in the questions “what do you do with this data? How do you use those things?” That’s the part that’s most interesting to me: how do you go from observation to something actually changing?

Meg: That’s been the focus of some of your recent work — how we can use geospatial data and satellite imagery, much of which is open source. First, can you just explain what remote sensing is?

Agnes: Remote sensing is a way of imaging the earth from space. There are hundreds and hundreds of satellites circling the earth, all with multiple different sensors on board. You can think of these as different cameras that are taking pictures of the earth’s surface, but specifically what these sensors are capturing is electromagnetic radiation. The electromagnetic spectrum is like the light spectrum — the spectrum that includes visible light — but it also includes infrared radiation, which tells us loads of information about vegetation and minerals on the earth’s surface.

Meg: How did you get into remote sensing?

Agnes: I’m originally an electronic engineer. Since I was a little kid, I’ve always loved maps, which are an interesting way in to thinking about the complexity of representation. For a couple of years now, I’ve been co-teaching a class with Murad Khan at University of the Arts London called Critical Infrastructures, which looks at the technology that we interact with and its social impact. As part of that, we show our students the work of Bellingcat, Forensic Architecture, and other investigative bodies that use remote sensing imagery in their investigations. At the moment I’m also a Technical Writing Fellow with the open-source investigative bureau Bellingcat, where I proposed to essentially look at remote sensing tools from the perspective of someone who’s technologically competent but hasn’t used them before. I do this through a practice where I involve my students and develop pedagogical tools around remote sensing.

Meg: And the work you’re doing with Bellingcat is specifically geared toward using remote sensing data in a journalistic context, right?

Agnes: I’m currently developing a proposal that looks at remote sensing indices and helps journalists learn how to use these tools to understand the physics of what’s happening in satellite imaging. The idea is also to encourage them not to be tied to specific platforms and data sets. For example, a lot of the work I do uses Google Earth Engine, which is a really well-made and amazing platform, but a lot of Google-based tools have a habit of disappearing overnight, as they are managed by this vast, maligned multinational company.

One reason I find satellite imaging appealing is the realization that there are often lots of different ways of seeing and understanding something. Satellite imaging affords a huge amount of richness in terms of informational content. So much more than a camera picture, because satellite sensors record information in many different wavelengths, way outside of the visible spectrum. This is called multispectral imaging. I think understanding the kind of relationships between those “images,” or sensed visual data, and the physical things that are happening — the chemical makeup of a scene, or whatever — offers a way of seeing that’s not rendered in just the purely “human eye” sense.

Meg: Can you give some examples of other ways of seeing that satellite imagery can offer? I know it’s sometimes used in gathering evidence for genocide, for example, and monitoring environmental degradation in different ways. You sent me a Bellingcat article that I found really interesting, which used satellite imagery to report how changing climate and environmental stressors — like lack of water and arable land — has contributed to recent tensions at the Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan border.

Agnes: Yeah, the Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan reporting is especially interesting because we are increasingly coming to an understanding of how so many conflicts are rooted in global heating and environmental degradation. Like we saw with the war in Syria, so many of these geopolitical conflicts are really exacerbated by climate conditions, and rooted in resource extraction. The environmental analysis of conflicts happening all over the world is very, very important. It’s also rhetorically important, in thinking about how urgent it is to act. 

Another area I’m interested in is looking at the long tails of pollution from the mining industry. So for example, the thing that I’m looking at particularly with my work with Bellingcat is traces of Bauxite mining and minerals in Jamaica, and the remnants of different areas of the mining industry there. Satellite imaging is also used a lot in archeological work, as there’s this sense of being able to see things at scale and across time. It's very appealing, this idea of being able to zoom out, but I would also come to it cautiously because you can lose a lot of information this way, and particularly lose a connection to what’s actually happening, to a locality. 

Another example of some remote sensing work I find really exciting is by the geologists James and Susan Aber, who have been imaging the same wetland for over 20 years in Cheyenne Bottoms, Kansas, to understand how it has changed over time, looking both from above and from below.

Relatedly, one thing I find quite exciting about this kind of imagery is that it’s possible to find satellite data going back to the 1970s. So there are ways of looking into the past and thinking about how changes to an ecology have influenced events that are happening now.

Meg: I’ve been following your work for a while, but I came to your interest in satellite imagery through a 2019 project you did with Gary Zhexi Zhang while you were both artists-in-residence of the pedagogical and agricultural organization Sakiya, based in the village of Ein Qinyya in Palestine. You created a simulation of Sakiya’s land, which explored the ecology of the site using information from soil sensors and weather data. 

Agnes: Sakiya is really oriented around the idea of art, science, and agriculture as things that overlap, and one of the things about the organization that excites me is that it takes technology — like traditional peasant farming techniques, for example — and looks at them as science and explores them as such. The way in which new and old technologies are used together there is interesting. It's an active engagement with the land, the history of the land, the future of it, and the massive technological innovations that have happened, particularly in the Fertile Crescent, over thousands of years. 

The Permaculture Network project came out of thinking about using soil sensors in the land and monitoring data. We were thinking about ways to represent data about the landscape in the West Bank, which is some of the most surveilled land in the world and subject to intense occupation. When you’re there, you constantly hear helicopters. Sakiya is in the West Bank, and is surrounded by illegal settlements. It’s now very often being raided by settlers who come in and break equipment and vandalize the artworks there. While we were there, we were asking ourselves how we could build an interface to this data and an image of the landscape in a way that doesn’t attempt to provide a one-to-one representation that could also potentially be used against the institution. Instead, we wanted to have a way of seeing that shows what‘s really happening with the landscape. Like, is the landscape happy? Are the plants growing properly? 

The design of the simulation draws a lot from the game Dwarf Fortress, which is a slightly infamous agent-based video game in which all of the elements of the environment are interacting with all of the other elements. In our simulation, all of these different parts of the landscape are interacting with one another constantly. At the time, and I imagine probably still, Sakiya was doing a lot of work around permaculture guilds and permaculture planting. Omar Tesdell, who runs an ecological collaborative called Makaneyyat, also based in the West Bank, did a really detailed survey and analysis of the ecology of Sakiya. The simulation draws on that research and seeks to represent the relationships between all these different plants, and think about them together. 

Meg: This project strikes me as a good example of what you were saying earlier about there being different ways of seeing and understanding, and exploring alternatives to how to use and represent this data. You were in the West Bank at Sakiya in 2019. I wonder how you’re thinking about this time or this work, five years later, against the backdrop of what’s happening in Gaza now. 

Agnes: Yeah. I mean, thinking not just about this project, but also more generally about imagery and visualization and ways of seeing — we can all see what’s happening. We can see a genocide happening; we can see massive environmental degradation. We can see really horrifying things to which there are political answers. There are things that can be done — to stop arms sales to Israel, to demand an end to the occupation. The thing that sometimes feels dispiriting is that, you know, one can be constantly seeing and the seeing is not enough. This is something we talk about with our students, asking the question, “what is the role of artistic representation?” If we are watching a genocide happen in Gaza and nothing is done about it, what’s the role of art? What’s the role of imagery? 

I think that the role of imagery is to go beyond representation and raising awareness. It’s actually to make well-articulated and refined demands. And, I don’t know, having gone to a lot of the protests in London, sometimes — not always — you can feel the clearness and focus of these demands. I think really taking that into action, that’s where this kind of work becomes important. One of the hopes that I have for tools like satellite imaging, which were until quite recently the domain of governments and large organizations, is that there is a resourcefulness there — that they can inform a sense of clarity in raising political questions, and that they can be tools to question rather than reinforce power.

Meg: To close this out I wanted to ask you, as someone who works with digital technologies, what’s your personal connection to the natural world? 

Agnes:  I’m really into the materiality of how I interact with the computer. I haven’t been gardening this year really at all, but for three years before that, I was quite diligently growing a lot of plants, both in New York and in London. I can often be quite a spreadsheet-y person, but I didn’t take a particularly spreadsheet-y approach to having a garden. I just put a lot of things in pots and hoped for the best. I also make ceramics and, similarly, there’s no strategy involved, it’s not very methodical. You just go in and you’re like, “okay, I’m going to try and feel it out and respond to it.” Increasingly, I’m interested in interactions with computing systems that feel a bit more like that.