Close Up at a Distance , List Visual Arts Center, MIT (1998)
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Close Up at a Distance 1
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Close Up at a Distance 2
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Close Up at a Distance 3
In 1995 a database of high resolution satellite images was declassified by the Clinton administration. This means that the first satellite images ever taken in the late 60’s were at a high resolution of up to 2 meters. This installation used declassified high-resolution Corona satellite imagery of Cape Town, South Africa, 1968. Exhibited in “The Art of Detection: Surveillance in Society,” List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, October-December 1997; and “Transatlantico,” Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderne, Las de Gran Canaria (Canary Islands), April-June 1998. Catalogues.
Close up at a distance
Laura Kurgan—1997
Space reconnaissance is traditionally divided into categories. One is called “Search,” and is dedicated to answering the question, “Is there something there?” Corona was designed to photograph large contiguous areas in a single frame of film in order to answer that question. A second observation function is “Surveillance.” Surveillance is required after one has decided that “There is something of interest there,” and says “I want to continue to watch that something, learn more about it, identify it and classify it.” In most cases, bona fide surveillance was beyond Corona’s capability. (1)
An American KH-4B satellite passed over the southwestern tip of Africa on 11 November 1968, leaving a trail of imagery behind for us to examine. Hundreds of miles above Cape Town, it exposed something political, opening up a landscape of data and of history in the image. Search, or surveillance? What can we do with what we see there now?
The privilege of seeing closely from great distances has until very recently been reserved for governments and militaries. It was only on February 22, 1995 that U.S. President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12951, releasing “certain scientifically or environmentally useful imagery acquired by space-based national intelligence reconnaissance systems, consistent with the national security.” Most of the images declassified with that order were from the so-called Corona missions, the first American reconnaissance satellites, which orbited the earth on “top secret” missions from 1960 through 1972. Now hundreds of thousands of these photographs from space are in the public domain, many providing detailed imagery at a ground resolution of five to seven feet, or two meters. (2) This means that objects and ground space larger than two meters are visible in these images. Compared with the best satellite images previously available to the public, from Landsat (thirty meters) and Spot (ten meters), it seems that we—or at least some of us—are getting closer and closer, from farther and farther away.
Corona’s images, it is said, were designed for searching, not for surveillance. Today the distinction between search and surveillance has become somewhat less sharp. To inquire about the existence of something, and to investigate and watch over it, can now happen simultaneously, and from enormous distances in striking detail. Increasing the resolution implies erasing the distinction between existence and identity —“high resolution” means that looking for things and looking after them, searching and “bona fide surveillance” take place in the same gesture.
Military satellites now regularly download digital imagery in the range of fifty- to even ten-centimeter resolution to a few privileged eyes, and by next year, commercial enterprises promise virtually real-time delivery of one-meter imagery from a host of new private satellites to anyone who can afford them. The declassified Corona archive makes older pictures widely available, and already what were Russian military spy satellites are now providing fresh two-meter resolution imagery on the open market. Soon some 90% of the globe will soon be routinely monitored, in a one-meter grid —to determine in the same movement whether something is there and to watch and learn about and identify it.
One-meter resolution means that a single pixel—the most basic unit of image data—represents one meter by one meter of the space it has scanned. By itself each pixel would be just that, a piece of an image, a snapshot from outer space. But in the age of digital networks this picture can be, and is, linked with data in other information systems (geographic coordinates, television images, historical records) and registered against them, transforming the image from a picture into a database.
In November 1968 the Corona satellite passed over Cape Town. What remains for us to see in these blurry, high-resolution pictures? We don’t just see things on the ground, places or people in and around Cape Town, apartheid city, seat of the South African Parliament today as then. What’s there is data, like it or not, and now we can look at and into the images to monitor in our turn the creation of this new datascape. Data need to be interpreted, and never can be fully. Scanning the surface of the image, scale can disappear, while shapes and textures, differences and identities, threats and possibilities, statements and metaphors emerge, moving in and out of the contexts that the long strips of film provide but never guarantee. Things become unrecognizable here, familiar features decompose, as others come sharply into focus. Today, we can search, and watch, across many degrees of magnification, for the future in this image.
(1) Jim Graham, Lockheed-Martin Space Corp., “Corona Program Profile,” May 1995.
(2) Kevin Ruffner, ed., Corona: America’s First Satellite Program, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC, 1995.