The common chaffinch is Switzerland’s most widespread breeding bird. It resides wherever there are trees. In spring, the males are rather colourful – this is when they carry their nuptial plumage: the crown and neck are blue-grey, the cheeks and chest reddish-brown, the upper back is brown, the lower back olive green. Both females and males are a rather inconspicuous brown in autumn and winter. The common chaffinch can always be easily spotted by its two white streaks on its wings and the two white outer edges of its tail. Its call is loud and shrill with a flourish at the end. The song of the common chaffinch varies from place to place; like humans, they have different dialects. In winter, most of the male chaffinches stay here while the females – which are smaller in size and thus less tolerant of the cold - migrate to Southwestern Europe.

S.H.: Buchfink

Taking Measures

, an international online symposium experimenting with new formats and usages of film and video. Thomas Julier has contributed a special portrait of the new robotic inhabitant in the Letzigraben...

Drohnenfilm

Drone film

Dr. med. vet. Martina Schybli
Swiss Ornithological Institute Sempach, 2020
Translated by Meret Kaufmann

Geflügelte Weltenbummler

Bird migration is a unique natural phenomenon recurring year after year. Billions of birds leave their breeding grounds every autumn and fly to faraway wintering grounds, only to eventually take up the long journey again in reverse in springtime. The reason for this mass migration is not so much the cold winter temperatures, but rather the concomitant shortage of food. Insects and other invertebrates are in short supply at this time, while ground frost and snow further impede the search for other food sources such as seeds. Besides the lack of food itself, other factors influence the migration of specific bird species, such as frozen lakes and rivers, or insufficient hours of daylight to hunt for food.

For many birds, the migration between breeding and wintering grounds represents a strategy for survival. A number of different migration strategies have emerged. Some birds, known as short-distance migrants, spend the winter in Europe or the North African Mediterranean area, thereby covering a comparatively short distance of roughly up to 2000 km. Among them are many water birds and several songbird species. Long-distance migrants, on the other hand, usually cover distances of over 4000 km, crossing the Sahara desert. Many insectivores, such as the common and alpine swift, the barn swallow and the red-backed shrike, are long-distance migrants. As the latter are more restricted in their nutritional base than short-distance migrants during winter, those with a longer journey not only take off earlier but also return later in the year.

Not all bird species migrate, however. Some species remain in their breeding grounds throughout the year; these are called resident or non-migratory birds. Resident birds are less restricted in their winter eating habits than pure insectivores, and have developed other strategies to cope with the environmental conditions in winter. Most European species of wildfowl, woodpeckers and owls are non-migratory birds.

Partial migrants are a special case. As their name suggests, one part of the population migrates to wintering grounds, while the other keeps to their breeding grounds all year round. Many birds in urban areas are partial migrants; well-known examples are blackbird, robin and chaffinch. Most other birds in urban areas are short-distance migrants or resident birds.

During daytime, the heat-sensitive cameras in the Chameleon Eyes artwork in Heiligfeld Park are most likely to capture typical city birds, such as crows, tits and finches; as well as the common and alpine swift, who are typical to this area. In contrast to most birds in urban areas, swifts are long-distance migrants. But you never know: especially in spring and autumn time, a great number of other species can be seen passing through at night. The thermal imaging cameras may not able to precisely determine the bird species; yet it remains very exciting to be able to witness the sheer extent of this mass migration of birds happening right above our heads, usually without us noticing.

Some species, including birds of prey, migrate during the day. However, the majority of migratory birds migrate by night. The position of the sun, the moon and stars as well as the Earth’s magnetic field set the approximate direction for migration. Finally, landscape structures, i.e. hills and mountain ridges, bodies of water and coasts, allow for more precise orientation. For many bird species, the migration route is genetically anchored; this is why young birds migrating for the first time will find their way on their own. But there are also some species where adult birds guide their young to show them the way. Geese, for example, are well known for this.

Migration is an exhausting time for birds and demands maximum performance. Therefore, migratory birds need to put on fat before departure and rely on places to roost during migration. Safe and quiet habitats offering food, shelter and rest are therefore essential. On their journey, birds do not want to waste any energy. Some species, including cranes and geese, fly in formation to minimise air drag, for example.

Large birds of prey and storks in turn use upwind, known as thermals, to cover great distances while gliding. If they need to cross the sea, they choose routes that involve as little flying over water as possible, since there are no thermals there. Nor does the sea offer any possibility for rest. For this reason, even smaller birds—that cannot use thermals, but only flutter—try to keep flight over water to a minimum. Most European migratory birds traverse the Straits of Gibraltar in the West or the Bosporus in the East; fewer fly over Italy, Corsica and Malta. Migration is a risky undertaking, not only due to natural phenomena like storms, extended rainy seasons or droughts but also due to human activities, such as bird hunting, which is still very common in the Mediterranean.

Bird migration is, above all, an adaptation to seasonal shifts in food supplies worldwide. These food supplies are currently changing rapidly due to climate change. Surveys already show that birds are trying to adapt their migration strategies to the altered circumstances caused by climate change. Many Nordic water birds, which previously flew from Northern Europe and Siberia to spend the winter in Switzerland, now find sufficient foods in ice-free lakes and rivers even in winter and therefore fewer and fewer come to Switzerland during the cold season. This is true of the tufted duck, for example.

In the ever warmer winters with less snow, short-distance migrants now also find enough food in Central Europe. They no longer fly so far and therefore depart later and return sooner, if they have not given up migrating entirely. A typical example is the red kite.

Long-distance migrants that spend the winter in tropical Africa have been particularly negatively affected by climate change. They usually only spend a relatively short part of the year in one area and depend on encountering optimal conditions in their respective habitats. In addition to the destruction of wetlands and deforestation, climate change also poses substantial problems to long-distance migrants: irregular rainfall and droughts in Africa lead to food no longer being available as regularly as in the past. In Switzerland, many long-distance migrants are consequently suffering from declining populations, while resident birds and short-distance migrants are able to confidently hold their ground.

Bird migration is a fascinating area of research in ornithology, which still holds many questions. For example, the exact location of winter quarters or how environmental conditions impact the birds’ point of departure are still unknown for many species. The Swiss Ornithological Institute in Sempach pursues questions such as these. In recent years, research using geolocators has been particularly successful. Geolocators are small and very light measuring instruments, strapped to birds like a rucksack. The sensors measure atmospheric pressure, acceleration, temperature, the Earth’s magnetic field and light intensity. This data allows conclusions to be drawn regarding the wintering grounds, as well as the altitude and behaviour of birds during migration and in their winter quarters. For example, the Swiss Ornithological Institute was able to discover that nightingales from the Basel area tend to spend the winter on the Ivory Coast and Ghana. In the case of bee-eaters from eastern Germany equipped with geolocators, it has been shown that these birds migrate to Angola while travelling in stable social groups.Radar systems, including weather radars, also offer interesting approaches. 

Radar systems capture migrating birds as biomass in airspace, thus enabling a large-scale visualisation of bird migration. This technology aims to make predictions regarding the temporal and spatial characteristics of bird migration, as well as revealing general behavioural patterns in migratory birds.Further information

Winged Globetrotters

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2020 Vision

In Man-tiq ut-tayr (The Conference of the Birds), a poem written by the twelfth century Persian sufi Farid ud-Din Attar, the birds of the world get together to discuss their desire to go in search of a leader. The hoopoe offers to be their guide. “We have a true king”, she tells them: “His name is Simurgh and he is the king of birds. He is close to us, but we are far from him.” The birds long to find this king. But as the hoopoe talks and it dawns on them just how long and hard the journey will be, many of them weaken in their resolve. The wagtail, the parrot, the partridge, the falcon, the quail, the nightingale, the peacock, the pheasant, the turtle dove, the pigeon, the hawk, the goldfinch: all of them find reasons not to go. “The journey to the Simurgh is beyond my strength”, says the nightingale. The peacock has no wish to leave his earthly paradise. The duck does not want to leave the water. “My passion for the sea is enough”, the heron says. “I have not the strength to go in quest of the Simurgh, so I ask to be excused.

”To most of Attar’s modern readers, this is a story about birds in only the most metaphorical sense: sufis refer to the language of mystical experience, that which cannot otherwise be said, as the language of the birds, and Attar simply uses them as screens on which to project human archetypes and desires.

Or is this indeed the kind of thing the birds discuss when they sing at dawn or gather in the evenings? Are they really only talking about food and sex, territory and defence, as the ornithologists suggest? How much are these prosaic explanations also projections of our own lives? Look, we say, they too are carrying seeds and diseases round the world, claiming space and fighting for it; just like us, they learn and remember, call and recall, recognise the seasons and navigate by what we know as features of the landscape, patterns in the stars. Are we sure? Is this all? What else might they be about? Can we even begin to imagine how they live, what they perceive, with what senses they operate, on what frequencies they broadcast, how they tell their secrets, if they have them? Might they be summoning the sap to rise, singing flowers into bloom, charming berries to ripen, calling on channels we can’t recognise, spreading news and messages and rumours on matters totally beyond our ken?

Could we ever tell them what we think we have learned? Would they even want to know all that we have studied and researched? Do they know that we follow them so closely, ringing and tracking and tracing them, trying so hard to capture them, to grasp what they are doing, get a grip on them? What would they make of all the ways we classify their attributes: the forms of feathers, colours of plumage, sizes of beak, dimensions of eggs, distances travelled, dinosaur ancestors, courting rituals, nest-building behaviour, feeding habits, migratory routes, all the questions we love to ask: “What are the figures? What’s the percentage?” In Der Kongress der Pinguine (The Conference of the Penguins), a 1993 Swiss film that is also like a long poem composed by Franz Hohler and the director Hans-Ulrich Schlumpf, these are the questions posed by humans, after which come other thoughts: “What questions would the penguins ask? Maybe these: What colour are thoughts? What number expresses pain? Do you know what we dream about?”

And what about the starlings as they wheel around at dusk, great swarms of them, effortless and elegant like nothing else: are these murmurations dances, performances, displays, celebrations of unknown rites, something utterly unthinkable? The artist and the poet have even fewer answers than the scientist. But they are more likely to know what to ask. “Were the penguins dreaming about us?” For all their qualms and in spite of their fears, Attar’s hoopoe finally persuades thousands of the birds to set off with her on the journey to find the Simurgh. The way proves long and treacherous, and most of the travellers do not survive: “out of all those thousands of birds, only thirty reached the end of the journey. And even these were bewildered, weary and dejected, with neither feathers nor wings.” Had their voyage been in vain? What had they achieved? Where had they arrived? Not at a place, but an awareness: si-murgh is the Persian word for “thirty birds”, and what they find is a reflection of themselves. “When they gazed at the Simurgh they saw that it was truly the Simurgh who was there, and when they turned their eyes towards themselves they saw that they themselves were the Simurgh.” Together they are what they were looking for.

And now: it is the spring of 2020. Have they noticed that so much has changed? Do the birds now wonder why the skies are clear, why theirs are suddenly the only intercontinental flights? Do they ask themselves why the world has quietened down, why so many people have disappeared from view, why their normal patterns of migration, feeding habits and so many of their other rituals have changed as the days grow long and the pink moon glows and the birds can feast with an abandon they have not known for years? Are they worried? Are they curious? Or simply pleased to have the skies to themselves, the storks and swifts and swallows who for once can travel north without attending to the planes that churn up the air space, trailing their debris across the sky? And to sing and hear each other with so little background noise, the sparrows and warblers and tits, the blackbirds and finches, the magpies and crows, the ducks and the seagulls so far from the sea, just like the people who have all flown home and now with their windows open, can hear their own voices in the air, echoing around the neighbourhood, murmuring and chattering, just like the birds.

This text is dated, like the moment: it won’t last, and this strange season will soon seem far away. Has the pandemic been forgotten? Do the effects continue to be felt? Has it changed the world? Has normal service been resumed? Is the air still fresh, the water clear, the sky as deep as it is this year? As it happens, while it is still happening, this spring is something special, a rare sighting of a break in time, a breathing space, not only for the birds.

2020 vision

Orit Halpern, 2020
Commissioned by Marie-France Rafael

Über planetarische Experimente

I am a historian of cybernetics and computer science who has been asked to contribute to the project “Chameleon Eyes” by Thomas Julier. The installation, to my understanding, is an interrogation of how machine vision (heat sensing) and communications make perceptible our relationships to other life forms, such as bird migration. In my response, I want to pose a few questions about the work of art in interrogating our concepts of “nature” and our engagement with technology. In order to do so, I wish to situate this work within broader scientific efforts of visualizing the planet inorder to ask how technical and cybernetic mediums produce our understanding of the Earth and in turn shape our relationships to the other living beings. These are questions I believe to be pertinent both to the installation and to the broader field of technological art practices.

In his presentation of the piece, Julier suggests that 

 suggests a new or “fictional” form of intelligence. Implicit in this argument is that intelligence can be produced in new modes beyond or outside individual bodies and through networked engagements between different forms of life and technology. In order to situate such ideas historically, and also ask about the forms of aesthetics being invoked here and their political and ethical dimensions, I want to turn for a moment to a much larger, and far more expansive scientific sensing project—the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The EHT is remarkable for turning the entire planet into a data capture machine and also for posing fundamentally new ideas about objectivity, vision, and artificial intelligences. These problems reflect back into the far more modest efforts by Julier and his ornithological colleagues to produce a cybernetic encounter with the movements of animals and machines through the atmosphere that we inhabit.

“a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer on the opposite side of it…”

On April 10, 2019 this first image of a black hole appeared to humanity. To produce this miracle demanded that scientists and engineers from a team spanning the globe turn the Earth itself into a vast sensor to gather data from black holes: the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Only a dish the size of this planet could create a sensor sensitive enough to collect weak electro-magnetic signals from 50 million plus light years away in order to provide at long last empirical evidence supporting Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

When the image was released it circulated at literally the speeds of light across that most human and social of networks—the Internet. Comments online ranged from amazement to vast frustration that the black hole did indeed look just like we thought it might. “Awesome,” “amazing,” “mystical,” “capable of making humans fall in love” jockeyed with “anticlimactic,” “really?”, and “it looks like the Eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings.” Maybe, such commentators suggest, the culmination of having turned our whole planet into a technology is just a fake artifact of computer graphics algorithms; merely another stereotypical image recalling longstanding standard Western cultural tropes of radically alien and powerful forces?[3] In combining both mythic aesthetic conceptions of outer space and the power of the g-ds with the dream of objectivity and perfect vision through technology, the image conjures a dual temporality. The event image crystallizes both new imaginaries of a planetary (and even post-planetary) scale future integrated through data and machine sensing and mobilizes our oldest and most repeated conventions of what extreme non-human alterity might appear like, returning us to the legacies of myth and g-ds.

Whatever the “truth” of this image, I argue that this image provides evidence of a radical reformulation of perception. This image presents both the figure of the terminal limits of human perception while simultaneously embodying a new form of experience, arising not from any one human or even technical installation but from the literal networking of the entire planet into a sensor-perception instrument and experiment. This image is therefore an allegory of the very artificial intelligence and machine learning systems that underpin it. It simultaneously embodies a classic problem in both physics and computation—namely, the impossibility of objectivity and the limits of being able to calculate or access infinity.

These problems have a history in science. As many scholars have demonstrated, the concept of mechanical objectivity first emerged in the 19th century with photography and film, and was linked to recognizing the fallibility of the human body, the impossibility of human objectivity that simultaneously birthed a new desire for perfect, perhaps divine-like objectivity, inherited from renaissance perspectivalism. This g-dlike objectivity would now arrive not through the celebration of the human but through prosthesis and mechanical reproduction.[4] The event horizon abandons a return to the liberal subject and offers a new model, not of objectivity as certainty, but as the management of uncertainty, the production in fact of new zones by which to increase the penetration of computation and expand the frontiers of both science and capital. In the case of the event horizon, the frontier is to reconcile and integrate two radically different forms of math and theory—general relativity and quantum mechanics. This is a scalar question—gravity is not understood in the same way at the large scale as at a sub-atomic or nano-scale. The hope is that these experiments will allow a unification of these two scales. In doing so, event horizon experiments are logistical in their logic, attempting to unify and syncopate the extremely local and specific with the very large and generic.

At stake are questions of chance and what constitutes evidence and objectivity for science. Black holes were predicted, but even Einstein did not believe his own prediction, because he refused to accept so radical a mutation of time and space. Einstein, it appears, still wanted to know the truth. The idea of a space beyond which his own laws no longer applied was unthinkable. The event horizon, however, is not the realm of surety, but rather that of probabilities and uncertainties. Physicists can define or speculate on certain state spaces but can never know the exact movement of any one particle or element. Furthermore, it is the territory of histories. Black holes may contain keys, “a backward film”, according to physicist and historian of science Peter Galison, of the Universe’s entire history. Time can reverse in the black hole, and the faint glimpse of the vast energies that cluster around the event horizon suggest possible past trajectories, but never just one.[5]

In response to this situation of imperfect visualizations and radical scalar and temporal indetermination, the call now is to increase computational power, and to add more dishes, perhaps in space, in order to increase the resolution of this massive instrument. This is the logic of communicative objectivity; the turn to automation and big data as modes of managing extreme uncertainty. The limits of knowledge are an imperative for technical progress.[6] Furthermore, the very apparatus of the EHT demonstrates the new integration between the scales of the earth and those of the stars to produce new economies and forms of knowledge.

One of the key installations in this project was the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) installation. On March 13, 2017, I visited this installation. Located on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the radio telescopes are 5050 meters up high in one of the driest and most extreme environments on earth.[7]

The entire installation appears to be designed to provoke a radical awe of scale, of human insignificance, and of the possibility of technical mastery of, and perhaps through, the vast vistas of the desert, and beyond that the stars. The vehicles that tow these machines are massive, specifically built by space agencies for their function. But even these machines, each tailor-made with tires two stories tall, seem almost tiny when viewed in comparison to the rest of the plateau.

In my mind, the high-altitude array reflected and advanced every fantasy of extraplanetary exploration I read as a child in science fiction fantasy books and watched on NASA-sponsored public programming on TV. This analogy is not just fiction. NASA and other space agencies use this desert to test equipment, train astronauts, and study the possible astrobiology of the future planets we will colonize.[8] If the event horizon is the point of no return, the Atacama is the landscape of that horizon, the infrastructure for our imaginaries of abandoning Earth and never ever returning to the past. But again, this is an irony, for ALMA collects history. Every signal processed here is aeons old, millions if not billions of light years in time-space.

This technical infrastructure combined with an environment among the most arid on earth produces strange aesthetic effects in a viewer. Such infinitude brought to us by the gift of our machines might be labelled “sublime.” What incites such emotions at one moment in history, however, may not in another. The sublime is a series of emotional configurations that come into being through historically different social and technological assemblages. My sentiments of extreme awe and desire for these infrastructures, a sense of vertigo and loss of figure-ground relations, a descent into the landscape, recalls the work of historian David Nye on the “technological sublime”. For North Americans, according to Nye, the later 19th century offered a new industrial landscape that incited extreme awe and concepts of beauty through structures like extension bridges. Structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge were deliberately built over the longest part of the river to prove the technical competence of its builders. Other constructions—skyscrapers, dams, canals, and so forth—were all part of this new “nature” that came into being at the time. Sites that produced a vertigo between figure and ground and reorganized social comprehensions of what constituted “nature” and “culture,” or objects and subjects. The sublime, after all, is loss of self into the landscape.[9] This particular “loss” of self, however, served a political economy, one of the emerging industrial capitalism of the time. Beauty has always had a morality, and in this case, that which was beautiful, the consumption of “nature” for capital, was what became valued.

Post-World War II environments saw a subtle shift in this aesthetic condition; the world was becoming increasingly mediated through television and other communication devices that made technical mediation a site of desire and aesthetic production and the site of value. ALMA takes the informational situation to a new extreme. Here technology produces a new landscape that turns infrastructure into a site of sublimity, confusing the boundaries of the technical and “natural,” and refocusing our perception towards a post-planetary aesthetic that is both about transforming scale (the earth is small) and time. The discourse surrounding ALMA suggests that all planets, including ours, and all their component landscapes are recording instruments surveying temporalities far outside of and beyond human experience.[10]

To process the most ancient of signals demands the latest in machine learning methods and other analytic techniques. These data sets are utilized in partnership by Microsoft and other similar organizations as training sets for their complexity and difficulty to clean noise from signals, and as environments providing sites for testing algorithms and experimenting with both new approaches to supervised and especially unsupervised learning.[11] The image was produced through a massive integrated effort, analogous to the scientific images produced by other remote sensing devices such as the Mars rovers. These rovers are coordinated, and their data synthesized and analyzed into signification thorough a large process that is not the work of individuals but rather groups. [12] The same can be said for the EHT.

To produce the event horizon image scientists used interferometry, a process that correlates radio waves seen by many telescopes into a singular description. The trick is to find repeat patterns that can be correlated between sites of the EHT and to remove the massive amounts of “noise” in the data, in order to produce this singular “image” of what the NSF labelled the “invisible.” Since black holes are very small in the scale of space, and a large amount of other data from different phenomena in space enter the dishes as well, only machines have the capacity to analyze the quantity of signals and attempt to remove the supplementary data. Signals are picked up from an array of observatories around the world, those that match what the theory of relativity predicted would be an event horizon must be correlated. To find these signals demands the data be “cleaned.” This is a critical component of finding the signals that are going to be correlated.

This process happened in many different sites. I visited the data cleaners for ALMA at the European Space Observatory base in Santiago, where we discussed the process. Many of the teams worked with different machine learning approaches to use unsupervised learning methods to identify artifacts in the data and remove them. The process was quite difficult since no one had ever “seen” an event horizon or knew exactly what was being sought out, information-wise.[13] Having never seen a black hole, and never being able to, what should we look for? Our machines are helping us decide.

Humanity however insists on its liberal agency. Irrespective of infrastructural capacities, the final image was attributed to a young woman, Katie Bouman, a post-doctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Bouman apparently created the algorithm that allowed the vast amounts of data coming from the EHT’s many installations to be compared and synthesized into a singular image. In fact, Bouman herself was not an astronomer or astrophysicist, but rather a computer scientist working on machine vision as a more generic problem.[14]

This attribution gestures to our own human temporal problems with the new media networks within which we are caught. It is not that the algorithm was not important, but that obviously a great deal of work by many people went into setting up the data-gathering experiment and developing methods to “clean” data. Bouman emerged as a progressive image that might translate the incoherence of a massive system into the identity politics of human history. The new discourse suggesting we ourselves, like Einstein, were not yet comfortable with the horizon to our own control and command over our networks. This tension between radical uncertainty and inhuman cognition, and our need to produce temporal command over data is one of the key features driving the growth of AI and its seemingly correlated discourses of mastery over futurity.

At ALMA, objectivity is indeed an impossibility. To process this data, figure-ground relations were literally confused. The official tour guide tells me that these telescopes contain units at the base that are the temperature of deep space in order to isolate and process signals from space and separate them from “noise” from the earthly atmosphere. By returning the signal into its “original” temperature the appropriate wavelengths of the signals can be isolated. In this installation data is literally being contextualized in an environment being built within the experimental set-up. The furthest outside to Earth is recreated within the machines. But perhaps this is the lesson of all scientific experiments… we create environments that are always already artificial and make nature from them.[15] Like the experiments of behavioral scientists and cyberneticians that produced new worlds in the name of depicting the planet, the ALMA telescopes recreate outer space within to produce visibility for the invisible, to reassemble aeons of galactic time in the space of scientific practice. And if we take the event horizon as the allegory for our present where we have turned the earth into a medium for information gathering and analysis then this is even more true. The sites of data production, data gathering, and analysis are increasingly blurry in their boundaries. The planet has become a medium for recording inscriptions.[16]

But time and data can be manipulated in many ways. Back on earth there is a film that came out in 2010, “Nostalgia for the Light” by Patricio Guzmán. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, on September 11th, 1973, there was subsequent torture and disappearance of thousands and the exile of nearly ten percent of the population, the paramilitary stalked Chile. Traveling in a Puma helicopter from detention site to detention site, the so-called “Caravan of Death” carried out the executions of 26 people in Chile’s south and 71 in the desert north. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves or thrown from the sky into the desert. The desert was militarized and turned into a weapon for the killing of dissidents and for the training of troops. Its resources supporting this state. Guzmán parallels the search for bodies by mothers of dissidents killed by Pinochet with astronomers watching and recording the stars in the Atacama’s high-altitude observatories (the wave millimeter arrays had not yet been operational). Above all his theme is that the landscape is a recording machine for both human and inhuman memories, the trace of stars 50 million years away, and the search for loved ones within human lives. The implications of the film are that the desert itself provides some other intelligence or maybe memory not only for humans. Guzmán offers us a dangerous romance with the possibilities afforded by our non-human intelligences that might augment or supplant our human memories. His story ties together the tales of cybernetics, astronomy, and economy that offer both horror, and imagination for encounter with radical forms of difference.

This returns me to the question of non-human intelligences and memories. I wonder, then, at this condition we live in and its link to artificial intelligences that have fundamentally positioned experience as a matter of extra-human or personal relations, perhaps beyond Terran experiences. We have turned our whole planet into a device for sensing the deepest coldest space; the first wager in perhaps the biggest gamble we are taking as a species. If optimization is the “event horizon” of earthbound ecologies, the very limit of the historical imaginary of economy by making it difficult to imagine running out of materials or suffering catastrophic events, then the event horizon appears as the very image to replace the finitude of the earth.

In a pessimistically optimistic vein, however, might this also be the final opportunity to undo the very fantasies of modern imperialism and anthropocentrism? There is hope in those infinitesimally specific signals found of a black hole from aeons ago, beyond human, even Terran time. The reminder that there are experiences that can only emerge through the global networks of sensory and measuring instrumentations; that there are radical possibilities in realizing that learning and experience might not be internal to the subject but shared. Perhaps these are just realizations of what we have known all along; that our worlds are comprised of relationships to Others. There is a possibility that never has this been more evident or been made more visible then through our new technologies, including those of finance and artificial intelligence. As they automate and traumatize us, they also reveal perhaps what has always been there—the socio-technical networks that exist beyond and outside of us. These are realities that are impossible to fully visualize; but possible to sense.

These new assemblages of machines, humans, physical force and matter also allow a reflexive critique, and create new worlds. We do not know what the EHT will yet unearth, but we do know, especially now as we are amid a global pandemic, that only our big data sets and simulations will guide us.

For the first time in history as a species, perhaps, we are regularly offered different futures, charted from different data sets and global surveillance systems. We are in a massive and ongoing test scenario, mirrored by the tests we are all taking for diseases. Different forms of governance are being experimented with, along with different understandings of data and what imaginaries they engender. But the planetary test is not a controlled experiment, its stakes cannot be fully known and may be terminal.

Artists must also contend with this historical situation. What forms of knowledge does art propagate? What ideas involving our ethical care for other forms of life are activated, or foreclosed, through media art? Do artists merely mime science, or offer another model for engaging with data and therefore with the future of life? Do the two compliment each other in new ways in an age of increased complexity and doubt?

We live at a time where complexity and data surplus are a given. We already assume we see through our machines and networks and that intelligence comes through networks. “Smartness” is part of the environment, our habitat. Smart cities, homes, electrical grids, transport… Everything is already cybernetic, if we understand that term to be about interlinking living organisms and machines.

This situation provokes a challenge for artists. How does one see differently, or in fact witness at all, within this machinic landscape? The Event Horizon Telescope is an allegory for this condition. It presents us with a radical encounter with our inability to ever be fully objective and the possibility that there are things to learn and forms of experience that are beyond the demands of capital or economy in our present. In many ways it is one possible culmination of a history of rethinking sensation, perception, and scientific epistemologies. But it is not the only possibility in a world of probabilities. Reactionary politics and extreme extractionism emerge from a perverse use of new media networks not to recognize our subjective and interconnected relatedness but rather towards valorizing older forms of knowledge and power; those of myth, cartesian perspectivalism, and “nature” as a resource for “human” endeavors. Those are the politics that separate figures from grounds, maintain the stability of objects, and understand the future as always already foreclosed and known. My hope is that perhaps in encountering the impossibility of ever imaging the reality of the event horizon, we might finally be able to witness and engage the precarious reality of life on Earth. This hope is one for both science and art; that we come to perceive our world differently and through our new found machine subjectivity come to finally care for Others.﻿

[1] Oxford English Dictionary, „Event Horizon (N),“ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[2] Wikipedia, „Event Horizon,“ Wikipedia, ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon.
[3] Dennis Overbye, „Darkness Visible Finally,“ The New York Times, April 10 2019.
[4] For an extensive discussion on the history of objectivity, and on the relationship between objectivity, perception, and technology see: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, „Image of Objectivity,“ Representations 40, no. Fall (1992); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer : On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1990).
[5] Dennis Overbye, „Infinite Visions Were Hiding in the First Black Hole Image’s Rings,“ The New York Times, 2020
[6] Ibid.
[7] The installation is run by a consortium headed by the European Southern Observatory, a number of universities in the United States, and a series of Japanese institutions. Chile granted concessions to the European Southern Observatory in 1963 across the Atacama for observatories, and in 1990 ALMA was officially bequeathed to the international consortium that runs it as an extra-territorial jurisdiction, often outside of local police jurisdiction. ALMA is also part of the history of scientific infrastructures with political implications. Located in the Global South, historically the ESO was founded to aid in bringing the European Union into being through scientific cooperation in the post-World War II years. ALMA is thus the producer of new forms of territory serving also as an allegory for the post-planetary imaginaries which its science envisions. European Southern Observatory, „Eso & Chile — a Scientific and Cultural Bridge,“ https://www.eso.org/public/about-eso/eso-and-chile/.
[8] NASA, „Cooking up the World’s Driest Desert - Atacama Rover Astrobiology Drilling Studies,“ no. June 20, 2018 (2018), https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/ames/cooking-up-the-world-s-driest-desert-atacama-rover-astrobiology-drilling-studies
[9] David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA. : MIT Press, 1994); Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945.
[10]	Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945.
[11]	Yanxia Zhang and Yongheng Zhao, „Astronomy in the Big Data Era,“ Data Science Journal 14, no. 11 (2015).
[12]	Janet Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
[13]	Interviews conducted at ALMA on my visit on March 13, 2019 and at the ESO Data Center in Santiago on March 20, 2017 revealed that many of the staff had been working on satellites and related information and communication problems before applying their research to the study of the stars. ALMA has pionerred work on exo-planets and finding asteroids and other potentially mineable objects on earth. Interviews with Yoshiharu Asaki, Associate Professor National Astronomical Observatory of Japan(at ALMA) and Chin-Shin Chang, Science Archive Content Manager (ESO Data Center, Santiago).
[14]	Maria Temming, „How Scientists Took the First Pucture of a Black Hole,“ Science News, April 10, 2019 2019; Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars; Lisa Grossman and Emily Conover, „The First Picture of a Black Hole Opens a New Era of Astrophysics,“ Science News, April 10, 2019.
[15]	Trevor Pinch David Gooding, and Simon Schaffer, ed. The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[16]	See also Jennifer Gabrys work on the idea of the planet as programmable through sensor infrastructures. Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

On Planetary Experiments

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Augen des Chamäleons

“To search for human visual realities, man must, as in all other homo motivation, transcend the original physical restrictions and inherit worlds of eyes. The very narrow contemporary moving visual reality is exhausted.”

Stan Brakhage, Metaphors of Vision (1963)

Humans must inherit worlds of eyes, writes Stan Brakhage, in order to learn to see anew. They must speculate about the vision of insects, such as that of bees, perceiving the ultraviolet spectrum of light; or about the tapetum of cats’ eyes, the mirroring layer of tissue behind the retina, which reflects each spark of light in the dark and illuminates it in intensified manner.[1] A film manifesto of the avant-garde, Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision (1963) is an ode to a way of seeing which disregards knowledge about the laws of perspective and the rules of pictorial composition and which is unbiased by world views that only exist by virtue of being able to be seen. It is an ode to a visionary way of seeing that is open to the adventures of perception, to the sheer endless multiplicity of colour gradations, and that might even be receptive to the spectrum of thermal waves, if only it were to forget and discard ideology, aesthetics and technology. It was the aspiration of the artistic avant-garde to renew vision and expand the boundaries of visual perception. According to Brakhage, film was yet to be discovered as an instrument of this artistic vision beyond camera optics (re-)producing an image of the world within the frame of standardised stipulations of a visual realism that is based on a Western historiography and its colonisation of perception. Though Brakhage does not mention them specifically, the eyes of the chameleon belong to the metaphors of the expanded way of seeing envisioned by the avant-garde. Chameleon eyes can not only change colour in order to communicate with fellow species, they can also move independently from one another, producing a broad field of vision. In contrast to other vertebrates, chameleons have lenses with negative refractive power, which refract and disperse light, rather than collimating it, making its retinal image unusually large while allowing for precise focussing. When a chameleon sets sight on its prey, the animal’s eyes adapt in a way that enables them to precisely measure the distance with unusually high speed and precision. 

What do we see through the ‘eyes of the chameleon’ – through the two robotic cameras on the rooftops of the new co-op buildings in the Letzigraben that can move independently from one another and whose images are broadcast live on the double-sided LED display in the park below? Their gaze is directed upward, towards birds in flight, which they do not capture photographically but thermographically, that is by way of the heat emanating from bodies within the infrared spectrum. Once the cameras capture such thermal radiation, they latch on to and follow the movement of flying birds, translating their body temperature into a play of colours on screen. But other celestial bodies and creatures in flight also stray into the camera-eyes’ field of vision – especially clouds, passing in a seemingly endlessly suggestive stream of images like thoughts or dreams. On a colourfully rendered firmament, the birds in 

 appear as bright spots made to shine. This film is to last ten years, a short lifetime. The LED screen, on which it plays in real-time, is situated in the Heiligfeld Park, in the midst of a ‘green’; that is, as far as the human eye processing electromagnetic radiation perceives nature as green, while the thermal imaging cameras on the LED screen display an ‘image of nature’ in which such radiation is made perceptible in a light spectrum beyond the habitually visible for us. It is almost as if nature is painting an image of itself in front of our eyes using the sensitive medium of thermography, as if the ‘pencil of nature’, of which William Henry Fox Talbot spoke in light of the invention of photography,[3] were now liberated to draw, too, what is usually beyond the the visible for us, in order for us to speculate what the world might look like through the ‘eyes of the chameleon’. Painterly effects are achieved on the digital screen, the coarse grid of which faintly echoes gestures of autonomy in modern painting. The latter, as Rosalind Krauss observed, had erected a ‘grid’ structure in order to shield itself against any external influences, such as the “scream of birds across open skies” that threatened to disrupt the silence of art and thwart the promise of its freedom and purity.[4]

“Comme un caméléon l’esprit humain se camoufle en camouflant l’univers.”

Blaise Cendrars, L’ABC du cinéma (1926)

Among the reasons for the delay of the Kunst-und-Bau project amidst the Covid pandemic is the fact that the contractor delivering the necessary technology got sidelined by an order to equip large businesses with thermal imaging cameras designed to detect fever symptoms in their workforce. However, the thermal imaging cameras do not make an infection with the virus visible, nor do they measure fever in the diagnostic sense. What they bring to light in the thermal image are body temperatures measured on the surface, through thermographic procedures visualising infrared radiation in different intensities. As a detection procedure, thermography is no less biometric than a passport photo or a portrait read through algorithmic facial recognition;[5] it does not register specific personal traits but a general corporeality. All bodies, animate as well inanimate, with a temperature above the absolute zero degree send out heat radiation in different wavelengths. The biologically relevant temperatures correspond to wavelengths in an atmospheric window of approximately eight to fourteen microns within the long-wavelength infrared spectrum (approx. -20 to 120°C).[6] The thermal imaging cameras convert this infrared radiation, which typically remains invisible to the human eye, into electrical signals to produce an image that translates the different wavelengths beyond the light spectrum into a colour coded representation. As these colours do not comply with the natural perception of humans they are called ‘false’ or ‘pseudocolours’, which allow us to see what is not visible to our eyes. The thermal imaging camera, in other words, is colour-blind; it captures inhabitants of this Earth not according to the colour of their skin, eyes, hair, their fur or feathers, but on the basis of the surface temperature of their bodies. Modelled on the thermographic image are not least the many cartograms visualising the global spread of the Coronavirus through coloured marking of the density of infections, thus transforming the world into a ‘heat map’ with visible sources of fire.[7]

In contrast to other measuring procedures, thermography distinguishes itself by being non-invasive and contactless. It makes bodies visible even over large distances and registers their heat radiation in darkness as well as under bad conditions of vision, in fog, smoke or snow. Thermography’s applications span the fields of surveillance, investigation, diagnostics, damage detection, quality management, maintenance, inspection and process optimisation. It is used by the military, border control and customs, by police and fire brigades as well as in veterinary and human medicine, climate research, geology, the construction and automobile industries, aviation and space travel as well as the industrial probing of workpieces. Thermal imaging cameras can reveal faults in buildings, leakages, material defects, fire sources, sports injuries and infections, trace buried, missed or fugitive persons, survey borders, perform military operations and curb pandemics.[8] In ornithology, too, thermography is used to monitor the thermoregulation, energy expenditure, behaviour, health and population of animals; since recently, it has also been used to observe the predominantly nocturnal migration of birds at great height. In contrast to the method of moon observation with a telescope, through which the passing birds become visible and thus countable as silhouettes in front of the moon’s beaming disc, thermography is not dependent on cloudless full moon nights to allow for the scale of migration to be measured.[9]

“That’s important from the point of view of people, but let’s talk about it as being important from the point of view of birds.” 

Margaret Atwood in an interview with the New York Times (2019)

In the thermographic image, we recognise what connects us humans with animals, namely the heat of bodies as shared vitality. These bodies are vulnerable; they can be protected as well as endangered, rescued as well as killed. According to the ancient Greek distinction between zoḗ and bios, as referred to by Giorgio Agamben,[10] thermography measures life as it is common to all creatures (zoḗ), as opposed to life as it is proper to specific beings (bios) and qualifies them as members of the political community. At the root of this argument is the implicit distinction between human and animal, through which life in the political community is only distinguished from the creaturely life shared by all beings. According to Agamben, the achievement of modern politics lies in the suspension of this distinction precisely in governing biological life by way of excluding the latter from the political order; by way of installing a permanent state of exception in which “bare life” is stripped from protection by the law and its rights altogether.[11] In political philosophy the question about life without—or deprived of—rights has been posed, too, from the perspective of animals. Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, for example, have expressed the need for a political theory of animal rights, which grants animals their place in the political order along with sovereignty and self-determination rights with regard to the territories they inhabit.[12] This would entail  habitat rights for wild animals, which would protect their environment from human intervention and destruction, as well as an equal say for domesticated animals, acknowledging them as members of the community. 

The image space outlined by the two thermographic cameras in 

 is at once a zone in which these debates are raised and played out against one another. Is all life therein reduced to a purely bodily, biological one, furthermore subjected to the eye of statistical control and surveillance? Are animals given their own place therein, a place in which they should also be granted rights within state law, not least the right to data protection? Or does the artwork open our perspective to lines of flight pointing beyond these optical systems and into the spheres of speculation about that which lies beyond the reach of our trained senses?

Nocturnal Appearance of Various Species of Furry Animals from the Neighborhood

 (2016) at the gallery RaebervonStenglin—Thomas Julier engaged with the urban ecosystems and habitats of animals and transmitted their predominantly nocturnal activity by way of food baits and infrared-cameras into the exhibition space. The experimental assembly in each case is site-specifically embedded within a scenography out of which different ideas and perhaps even narratives may develop about how humans and animals encounter each other in their shared habitats. The exhibition display figures as an intelligent distributed sensorium that probes the given habitat beyond the limits of what is visually evident, pushing into the dimensions of its virtuality and potentiality. In this sense, what Julier constructs is not so much an instrumental assembly designed for artistic, scientific or other forms of digital animal-monitoring, but rather a stage or scene of factually impossible views; a ‘world of eyes’, in which the unseen may unfold. The work meanwhile refuses to redeem the vision of the avant-garde to liberate seeing from the ideological and technical conditions of visibility, as it inevitably references the powers governing the image space.[13]

Situated in the midst of the public Heiligfeld Park of the Letzigraben estate, which was erected in the 1950s and has now gained three replacement buildings commissioned by the Siedlungsgenossenschaft Eigengrund and the Stiftung Gemeinnütziger Wohnungsbau Letzigraben, the artwork directly connects to the social outlook that is at the root of the ensemble. Integrating distinct housing types, the latter has striven to meet a variety of human needs and life designs and to thus partake in ideas of a pluralist and solidary society in post-war modernity.[14] The artwork extends this living space in as much as it is dedicated not exclusively to human but also incorporates non-human, including ‘artificial’ life, in its design of a shared habitat. Meanwhile, it casts its eyes beyond the interplay of housing and landscape architecture, onto a community of life of interspecies and intersectional relations and dependencies. In the thermal images we can consequently perceive the shared vitality of bodies as much as we can become acutely aware of the socioecological conditions which render these bodies vulnerable to environmental influences.[15]

Last but not least, this habitat is also a data space which extends the built and designed environment by the virtual sphere. In conquering this world-wide web, ornithology proves to be an avant-garde; particularly if we consider the project Icarus (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) that the Max-Planck-Institute is involved in. In this project, birds and other small flying animals such as bats and insects are equipped with mini-transmitters in order to follow the animals on their migratory routes and to measure their patterns of movement telemetrically, through an antenna specifically placed for their investigation at the International Space Station (ISS) in outer space.[16] Besides information regarding location, the transmitters also register physiological data such as body temperature, heart rate or oxygen levels, through which assertions about the animals’ behaviours and stress levels can be made. The data gathered in this way serves the animals’ welfare, the protection of species as well as the development of ecological approaches; as much as it allows for insights into the spread of aviary influenza and other virus infections, for early warnings about natural disasters such earth- and seaquakes, volcanic eruptions and hurricanes, or simply for forecasting the weather. In light of such an “internet of animals” Alexander Pschera speaks of an invention of nature borrowed from the spirit of digital technology, of a new “dialogue between human and animal” even, in which both are now twittering.[17] An exchange of perspectives is able to occur, in which humans take on the viewpoint of animals in looking at the environment and explore the aviary flu, for example, from the observatory of birds.[18] Simulations of possible crises or catastrophic scenarios in which animals play a role expand habitual forms of observing nature by integrating the perception of animals or that which humans imagine this to be. 

“As spies, racers, messengers, urban neighbors, iridescent sexual exhibitionists, avian parents, gender assistants for people, scientific subjects and objects, art-engineering environmental reporters, search-and-rescue workers at sea, imperialist invaders, discriminators of painting styles, native species, pets, and more, around the earth pigeons and their partners of many kinds, including people, make history. (…) We all are responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, and sometimes joyful histories too, but we are not all response-able in the same ways. The differences matter – in ecologies, economies, species, lives.”

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016)

Thomas Julier’s Kunst-und-Bau project does not simply represent a scientific interest in the live measurement of bird flight, for one, as the data generated and saved by the work fails to provide any information on distances or heights, which would be required for ornithological studies. Besides, the latencies, that is the temporal lags between the controlling pulse and the movement of the cameras, is such that the prediction of the flight tracks of birds is only possible under specific conditions. Thus, the robotic cameras will frequently lose sight of the birds, which give the impulse for the cameras’ pan & tilt in the first place. The birds thus elude continuous tracking, but as impulse-givers they set in motion a rhythmic play with the possibilities and limits of predictability, between fixating and fleeting glances. And, time and again, clouds are passing as amorphous colourful constructs. Gaston Bachelard called clouds the imaginative material for those people too lazy to create their own.[19] In the clouds, they may catch sight of forms taking shape while continuously refusing to be captured, that escape the work of the nubigenous imaginary. For the US-American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, clouds represented a possibility to liberate the photographic eye from seeing forms altogether. From 1922 and over the course of a decade, Stieglitz shot clouds time and again, in photographic studies which aimed, among other things, to undermine the construction of the optical apparatus according to a central perspective. These studies have consequently been lauded as early examples of abstract photography. They bring another viewpoint into the picture; a point without other reference points that would allow to optically measure proportions in size or distances; a point that is seemingly bottomless, tumbling—be it upward or downward—into the sky. Stieglitz called this series encompassing approximately 220 photographs Equivalents; images that resemble photographs yet aspire to be much more of a musical sequence, “songs of the sky“.[20] Inasmuch as the sky in the photographs of Stieglitz, returning to Rosalind Krauss’s observations, is “essentially not composed”[21], these photographs undermine the categories of a vision grounded in the perspectival construction and control of the image. They point to other potentials of photography; among them the unrealised possibilities in the history of European art which, departing from the visual theory of the Arabic optician Alhazen, invented the central perspective, while the Islamic art generated its geometric abstractions from it—abstractions that do not comply with any perception of the world which takes the human eye as its centre point.[22]Dario Gamboni considered the cloud photographs by Stieglitz—as well as other cloud images of modern art, such as Charles Giron’s The Clouds (1901), Lyonel Feininger’s Bird Cloud (1926) or Vik Muniz’s The Snail (1993)—as “potential images”;  images which rebut claims of authority and power over the depicted, over its perception and effects, and return it into a space of the potential, of the undefined and uncertain.[23] At the point at which they pursue the democratic demand to make the viewer an equal participant in the construction of the image, they are not free from the ambivalences and contradictions that accompany our gaze into the sky. The uncertainty proper to them is not least an effect of the incapacity to separate the spheres of the aesthetic and the political, to keep the fine arts out of the military-industrial complex, with which they share their imaging technologies. Gazing into the sky is an occupation of fantasisers and dreamers, mystics and poets, artists and visionaries. But it is, too, the occupation of the meteorologists and ornithologists, collecting data from the atmosphere and the avifauna, or of the civil and military surveillance of aerospace, using these meteorological and ornithological data for other purposes than such as the stately security policy.[24]Where the scenario of human and non-human species cohabiting eludes both the visual documentation of reality as well as reliable forecasts, where it escapes prognosis and prediction, at least it remains possible. In view of this scenario we can neither venerate the liberation of art to non-optical vision nor its surrender to the regime of technologically upgraded surveillance. Instead, following Donna Haraway’s suggestion in her critique of the Anthropocene,[25]  all we can do is ‘stay with the trouble’ in view of what we see through the ‘eyes of the chameleon’.  ﻿

[1] Stan Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision”, in: Metaphors on Vision (1963), ed. P. Adams Sitney, New York: Anthology Film Archives and Light Industry, 2017, n.p.
[2] Ibid.
[3] William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (1844-1846), Munich: Hirmer, 2011.
[4] Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” (1981), in: The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass., London: The MIT Press, 1985, p. 151–170, here p. 158.
[5] See Roland Meyer, Operative Porträts. Eine Bildgeschichte der Identifizierbarkeit von Lavater bis Facebook, Göttingen: Konstanz University Press, 2019.
[6] This corresponds with the spectrum of wavelengths captured by the two cameras. See also Dominic J. McCafferty, “Applications of Thermal Imaging in Avian Science”, in: IBIS. The International Journal of Avian Science 155 (2013), p. 4–15, here p. 5.
[7] For example, the dashboard of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html.
[8] Thermography may thus be counted among one of the technologies of “statist visuality”, as described by Joseph Pugliese with view to the biopolitical governing of illegal migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Joseph Pugliese, “Technologies of Extraterritorialisation, Statist Visuality and Irregular Migrants and Refugees”, in: Griffith Law Review 22/3 (2013), p. 571–597.
[9] See George H. Lowery, Jr., “A Quantitative Study of the Nocturnal Migration of Birds”, in: University of Kansas Publications, Museum of Natural History 3/2 (1951), p. 361–472; as well as Felix Liechti, Bruno Bruderer, Heidi Paproth, “Quantification of Noctural Bird Migration by Moonwatching. Comparison with Radar and Infrared Observations”, in: Journal of Field Ornithology 66/4 (Autumn 1995), p. 457–468.
[10] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p. 9.
[11] Ibid., p. 12 f.
[12] Sue Donaldson, Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis. A Political Theory of Animal Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. See also Robert Garner, A Theory of Justice for Animals. Animal Rights in a Nonideal World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; Eva Meijer, When Animals Speak. Toward an Interspecies Democracy, New York: NYU Press, 2019; Bernd Ladwig, Politische Philosophie der Tierrechte, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020.
[13] Following Tom Holert’s formula of the “governing of image space” in his eponymous collection of essays: Regieren im Bildraum, Berlin: b_books, 2008.
[14] See Ruedi Weidmann, “Handlungsspielräume bei der Realisierung einer neuen Bauform. Die Letzigraben-Hochhäuser von A. H. Steiner 1950-1952”, in: Albert Heinrich Steiner. Architekt – Städtebauer – Lehrer, ed. Werner Oechslin, Zurich: gta, 2001, p. 72-107.
[15] J. T. Demos, “Ecology-as-Intrasectionality”, in: Panorama. Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5/1 (Spring 2019), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.1699.
[16] Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Icarus. Global Monitoring with Animals, 2020, https://www.icarus.mpg.de/en.
[17] Alexander Pschera, Das Internet der Tiere. Der neue Dialog zwischen Mensch und Natur, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2014.
[18] Frédéric Keck speaks of such an exchange of perspectives in relation to the SARS-pandemic, when researchers prepared for a possible outbreak of the aviary flu by identifying with the perspective of birds in simulating crisis scenarios. Frédéric Keck, Avian Reservoirs. Virus Hunters & Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, p. 109: “(…) humans exchange their perspectives with animals in an imagined future where their relations are reversed.”
[19] Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes. Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement, Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1943, p. 239 f. See also Rainer Guldin, Die Sprache des Himmels. Eine Geschichte der Wolken, Berlin: Kadmos, 2006; Johannes Stückelberger, Wolkenbilder. Deutungen des Himmels in der Moderne, Munich: Fink, 2010; Tobias Natter, Franz Smola (Hg.), Wolken. Welt des Flüchtigen, exhib. cat. Leopold Museum Vienna, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013.
[20] Alfred Stieglitz, “Wie ich dazu kam, Wolken zu fotografieren” (1923), in: Wolkenbilder. Die Erfindung des Himmels, ed. Stephan Kunz, Johannes Stückelberger and Beat Wismer, exhib. cat. Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Munich: Hirmer, 2005, p. 85-89.
[21] Rosalind Krauss, “Stieglitz/Equivalents”, in: October 11 (Winter 1979), p. 129-140, here p. 134.
[22] See Hans Belting, Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks, Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008, p. 12. For a discussion of thermography in the context of the history of perspective, see Ulrich Meurer, “Invading/Inviting. From Surveillance to Byzantium”, in: ZKM. Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 11/1 (2020), p. 157-173.
[23] Dario Gamboni, Potential Images. Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art, London: Reaktion Books, 2002, p. 157, 215, 240, 241 ff.
[24] See Lars Willumeit, “Seeing the State vs. Seeing Like a State. How to Secure a Country as an Anti-Instructional Visual Research Project”, in: Salvatore Vitale. How to Secure a Country – From Border Policing via Weather Forecast to Social Engineering. A Visual Study of 21st-Century Statehood, ed. Salvatore Vitale and Lars Willumeit, Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019, p. 7-22.
[25] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Bird Calendar

Common Chaffinch