Calculating Skies: Topologies of Air and the Airspace Tribunal
From the opening shots of “Topologies of Air,” Shona Illingworth’s three-screen video and sound installation, we are presented with a restricted view of the sky. Broadly associated with expansiveness, if not freedom, this distilled vista suggests an overdetermined environment that is subject to competing interests — be they national, military-industrial, or economic — that often remain impenetrable to observers.
This is a vision of a claustrophobic firmament, a partitioned dome of airspace that is endlessly quartered through the interventions of all-consuming, mercenary systems of power and control. Under these conditions, and to ensure that national, military-industrial, and commercial interests are preserved, the apparent immateriality of airspace needs to be rendered both material and calculable. Fought over, allocated, and reserved, the substance of air must be not only quantifiable but also an instrumental element in the production of data, the maintenance of hegemony, and the projection of power.
The systems that calculate the substance of air are increasingly autonomous apparatuses, as in the case of drone technologies and Lethal Autonomous Weapons (LAWs). Through satellite surveillance systems, the command of such armaments is evident in the effect they have on the communities that are subject to their disciplinary practices. The unprecedented development of aerial surveillance technologies and LAWs, aided by advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), effectively constitute an evolving regime of power and domination that further establishes the realities of neocolonial forms of subjugation. This process not only amplifies already existing disparities in disciplinary forms of power — based on the extraction and repurposing of data — but renders entire communities susceptible to the invariably devastating, if not catastrophic, impact of an unchecked military-industrial takeover of extraterrestrial space. Whereas colonial occupation was once largely achieved through actual invasion, it is now inevitably realized through the application of advanced surveillance systems and drone-led infractions of international law.
