Field Notes from Orbit
This series of posts extends Landscapes of the Anthropocene beyond the confines of the visual cabinet. Each entry works as an ethnographic companion—a textual experiment that unfolds alongside the satellite images, diagrams, and maps that compose the project. Rather than simply explaining what is seen from above, these reflections ask how remote sensing can become a form of fieldwork: how pixels, clouds, and spectral traces might participate in the making of ethnographic knowledge. They are not technical tutorials but attempts to inhabit the planetary view critically and poetically, translating geospatial observation into situated understanding.
Through these posts, Landscapes of the Anthropocene becomes an evolving notebook of method. Each reflection engages a different practice—watching a time-lapse as if it were a weathered testimony, reading an NDVI map as a fragment of labor and decay, or experimenting with classification as a form of storytelling. The aim is to slow down the technological gaze, to attend to what satellites both reveal and erase, and to recompose remote sensing into a practice of care, interpretation, and grounded speculation.
Together, these companion texts will form the project’s interpretive layer: the thick descriptions that accompany the planetary images. They will trace how ethnography transforms when it looks outward—toward orbit, atmosphere, and infrastructure—without losing its grounding in local lives and materials. Each post will test a new way of seeing, sensing, and composing with the Earth’s changing surface, keeping alive the tension between observation and implication, distance and touch.
