In “Situated Knowledges,” Donna Haraway famously challenges the scientific fiction of  the apparently neutral gaze that conceals the embodied conditions from which vision takes place. Technological images frequently encourage precisely this fantasy, as it is the case in satellite photography. From above, forests, oceans, cities, deserts, fires, and melting ice sheets appear available to us in their totality. We hover over the planet with an almost divine visual authority. Distance appears to produce objectivity. But there is no view from nowhere. This matters enormously when we consider the representation of the more-than-human world. Technology has enabled extraordinary encounters with lives and processes that would otherwise remain inaccessible. 

              

Yet every act of technological revelation also risks becoming an act of reduction. The more information an image contains, the easier it can become to confuse information with the thing itself.

 

Some of the most compelling contemporary artists working with technologically mediated nature deliberately return this concealed apparatus to visibility, revealing that technological realism has always depended upon institutional validation. The history of technologically enhanced vision makes this particularly clear because each successive interface has required us to place greater trust in representations of realities increasingly removed from direct sensory verification. We learned to trust the telescope, the microscope, the camera, the X-ray, the satellite, the scanner, the sensor, the dataset, and the algorithm. Each has expanded reality while simultaneously reformulating the conditions through which reality can be known.                                

 

The epistemological essence of technological realism lies precisely in this strange space between revelation and construction. Every interface opens a window while simultaneously building the frame through which we look. It allows something to appear, but appearance comes at the cost of translation. The more we see, the more important it becomes to ask who, or what, has taught us how to see it.                        

 

The previous issue of Antennae considered realism as a cultural and ideological technology through which nature is made to mean; this second installment turns toward the technologies through which nature is increasingly made visible in the first place. The question at the center of this issue is therefore deceptively simple: what does it mean to see something we cannot see? My gratitude goes to all the contributors to this issue, to Antennae’s academic board for its ceaseless support and expertise and to everyone else who has made this exploration possible.