Aerial Perspectives, Landscape, and Power: Politicized Images in Art and Visual Culture

As aerial perspectives become increasingly prevalent in contemporary visual culture, it is essential to develop more fluency with the visual language that produces these views of the world. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to consider the aerial perspective as a dominant twenty-first century visual paradigm, across art and multiple forms of visual culture. Using case studies drawn from contemporary art and politicized media images, including drone and satellite imagery, the frequently asymmetrical relationships between sky and ground are analyzed according to key concepts such as invisibility and visibility, omniscience, scale, distance, and resolution. Select artworks – by Trevor Paglen, Fazal Sheikh, Stephanie Comilang, and Sophie Ristelhueber – as well as projects undertaken by visual investigation teams, are able to reveal the relationship between top-down views and forms of power such as imperialism, capitalism, surveillance, and militarism. This contemporary visual paradigm is also historicized through examples of landscape art from the Western tradition, including targeted landscapes that depend on Renaissance one-point perspective, sixteenth-century “world landscapes,” and nineteenth-century Romantic landscapes. The thesis showcases the work of visual investigation teams that draw upon opensource analytic techniques to challenge state-driven narratives, while equipping digital citizens with the skills to do likewise. Ground-level testimony and mobile storytelling are also brought forward, as ways to dismantle the omniscient voice traditionally associated with the “god’s-eye” view