| dc.description.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. | eng |