Territory, Imaginary, Ecology A Critical Cartography of the Sky

Abstract

The emergence of the manmade technosphere resulting in the Anthropocene has transformed the sky from a metaphorical space of aspiration into a contested geopolitical territory that can be actively designed, commodified and divided. Datafication, referring here to the encoding of atmospheric phenomena through computational platforms, navigation interfaces and live satellite data, has flattened the complex three-dimensional spatial field of the atmosphere into a scalable data surface, hiding the situated, nonscalable dimensions of the sky. The central problem of this research addresses the transformation from sky as social field and elemental media, and historical projection plane for aspiration, to a territory of governance, colonisation and property, and aims to make the co-presence of sky imaginary and atmospheric territory visible and navigable for architectural imagination and practice through the creation of a critical cartography. (Panofsky, 1971; Iwaniszewski, 2011; Tsing, 2012; Kurgan, 2013; Morton, 2013; Parks, 2013; May, 2017; Just, 2024)

Keywords: hyperobject, sky, territory, encoded relationality, critical cartography