Time flies: Visualizing aerial technologies

The world’s largest environmental disaster was felt by no one. When the Chinese military recently demonstrated their anti-satellite missiles, deadly debris was scattered across our heavens further than any other manmade event in history. Our increasingly crowded skies are creating safety hazards that are proliferating without public awareness partially due to our inability to visualize and display the massive, transscalar real estate and activity of aerial technologies. Each industry has become adept at tracking its own assets yet none has succeeded in finding a model that represents the entire evolving techno-system in one visual strategy.

Celestial Mechanics is a multi-year artistic research project investigating not big data but big data spaces. By creating speculative prototypes that employ non-linear perspective, kinetic display, immersion and non-terrestrial temporality, iterative visual strategies are being developed to present the global scale of hardware above us. This article considers kinetic and interactive display prototypes to offer new possibilities for the representation of movement, time and space and proposes that hybrid mediation may assist in both industry and public understanding of a crisis that is global yet invisible.