The View from Above (2025)

The View from Above is an installation that examines how infrastructures of artificial intelligence, mapping, and atmospheric data shape perception and the politics of territory. A 7 x 7 ft kite, fabricated in the form of early surveillance kites once deployed by colonial powers, becomes both a sculptural object and a projection surface for a continuously shifting digital environment.

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Audience interaction drives the system. Visitors type the name of a country into a website, which is translated into coordinates via Google Maps’ API. Those coordinates then call live data from Open Meteo, including temperature, precipitation, pollution, and wind. Each parameter is rendered within a real-time simulation in Unreal Engine. Light shifts with temperature, haze thickens with pollution, rain falls with precipitation, and the camera drifts with the wind.

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The projected world is never fixed. No single participant determines the outcome. Each input is combined with the most recent entries to produce a composite location, meaning the environment is always contingent and collective.

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The work situates itself within broader questions of visuality and power. Colonial cartography treated maps as instruments of control, where to map was to claim. Today, platforms such as Google Maps redraw borders depending on where they are viewed, producing contingent realities shaped by geopolitical pressure and algorithmic rule. The installation extends this logic into real time, making perceptible how vision has shifted from individual perspective to an operation of infrastructures. The View from Above asks how subjectivity, agency, and representation are reconfigured when visibility is authored by systems rather than by human eyes.