CLUI Takes Wide View of Remote Sensing

REMOTE SENSING IS A SCIENCE involving detection and observation from a distance. Remote sensing is also an art, involving creativity, subjectivity, and interpretation. The CLUI explored these aspects of the field over the last year, through an exhibition in Los Angeles focusing on the roots of the technology in Southern California aerospace, and programs at the CLUI Desert Research Station, including a public bus tour.

From surveillance aircraft, to earth observation satellites, to reconnaissance drones, aerospace in Southern California is largely about remote sensing. Systems for seeing beyond the normal limits of visibility were developed here, and remain at the core of aerospace missions pursued around the world today.

Remote sensing is generally understood to be a technique for obtaining information about objects and areas from above. This can be done passively and macrocosmically, where a wide view from far away exposes phenomena and relationships. Remote sensing can also focus inward, microcosmically and actively, by bouncing electromagnetic waves off surfaces, making the invisible apparent, using radar and other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. 

The quest for an expanded view for strategic ends is an ancient human activity, enabled for millennia by hilltops and towers. Though telescopes and other optics helped to shrink the distance, little changed in remote sensing technology until the 20th century, with the invention of powered aircraft. 

World War II brought radar, followed by jet-powered high-altitude surveillance planes, and rockets that hoisted satellites into space, the ultimate high ground, transmitting remotely sensed views of the earth back to earth, ushering in the current age of aerospace. 

Remote sensing technology sees more than the merely visible, employing multispectral sensors operating beyond the wavelengths of visible light. These digital signals are linked by global communication networks feeding data to processing centers and control rooms anywhere and everywhere on earth.
 

The Remote Sensing exhibit at the CLUI in Los Angeles was built to resemble one of these control centers—like a mission control, or a network operations center, though it controlled little, besides the information it contained.

The display was an exhaustive site-based look at the evolution and current state of the aerospace industry in Southern California, which dominated the economy of the region for decades, and is still very much here, and busy.

Animations of remote sensing satellites looped on an upper row of three large screens—one displaying anatomies of selected satellites, one showing orbits of satellites swirling around the globe, and another depicting satellites scanning the earth’s surface.

These animations were produced by NASA, which is as proficient at making animations of space, as it is at performing activity in space itself. The two, in a sense, are part and parcel, the art at the service of the state of the art. Since we can’t usually see the space projects NASA does—which are the very definition of remote—we have to rely on their depictions.  

Much of the public view of space is actually generated by NASA and its local facility, the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), as well as the sci-fi staples of the entertainment industry, which has a long history of working with JPL illustrators and animators. NASA’s video depictions of gently rolling, perfectly lit spacecraft, orbiting a distant planet, look like they were shot by an intergalactic production crew, directed by Stanley Kubrick himself. Like the sign at the entrance of the JPL campus in Pasadena says, “welcome to our universe.”

Below this lofty performance of space ballet in the CLUI exhibit was a second layer of screens that show some kind of ground truth: CLUI images of more than a hundred places of business around Southern California that have contributed to our national aerospace legacy, as they look today, viewed from public space, on the ground.

Beneath this was a row of five touchscreens, set up on a table, like workstations, each featuring a region: West, North, East, South, and Desert. On each screen were buttons with names of dozens of places. Visitors to the exhibit could sit and dig into the screens with the tip of their finger, viewing images, text, and remotely sensed views of these places, all of which truly are out there, and around here. ♦

EXPLORE AEROSPACE SITES IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Remote Sensing: Explorations into the Art of Detection was presented as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.