Prof. Dr. Pamela C. Scorzin in Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine

From Terrestrial to Orbital Perspectives — with a particular focus on German artist Achim Mohné

The shift of perspectives, from local via global to orbital, and back down to Earth 
again, is fundamental to the concept of the Anthropocene. It is a recently 
proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human
 impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including anthropogenic climate
 change. Contemporary art reacts to these epochal shifts in a variety of ways. It is
 not only about creating new spectacular views and scenery but rather, in many
 ways, about basic changes of perception and experience that lead to a new critical
 awareness and heightened environmental consciousness. Artists like Trevor
 Paglen and Achim Mohné, among others, are interested in exploring and
discussing the increasing importance of comprehensive surveillance systems and
 data mining by satellite technology and drones nowadays. Sometimes, they
 appropriate, or they try to hack these new scopic regimes with their artistic 
rhetorics and aesthetics. For instance, they are smuggling their poetic artworks 
into the networked systems, or are scrutinizing its unique digital image culture,
 which sometimes produces strange imagery like, for example, the glitch and digital
 abstraction. In the end, this contemporary digital art also asks what becomes 
visible and what remains invisible in a cyber-control age that highly commercializes
 the use of satellites and camera drones as well as live-observation of the planet.
 More over, in the age of digitalization, picture-taking is everywhere getting more
 and more automatized, and more and more images are produced as well as
 generated and processed with the help of orbital satellite cameras with intelligent,
 deep-learning algorithms nowadays. These are the post-human eyes onto Earth.

Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine, vol 5, issue 5, March 2020, pp. 25 - 49.
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