Come in cielo, così in terra: dispositivi, mappe, produzione artistica

Abstract

The geographical description of the world has always had a linguistic dimension: it is a symbolic process of translation in which the signs simultaneously describe and portray. In this regard, the “history of lines” is also the history of the will to regulate the visible and give an order to the world. In recent years, the drones have become emblems of a visual geographical culture dominated by the importance of the view from above, “tamed”, in civilian zones, by Google Maps and Google Earth. Today, many artists and performers have made the aerial view, the video surveillance, and the technological colonization of the skies the object of their investigation. A counter-geography and a visual counterculture indicating borders, weapons, and tactics of a new battlefield: the one between earth and sky opened, in the middle of the last century, by the first satellite picture.