Satellites have made the news headlines a lot lately. On September 30th the world's first commercial spy satellite -- jointly owned by Lockheed, Kodak, and Mitsubishi -- captured a high resolution image of people walking through the intersection of 14th and Constitution in Washington D.C. Last year in a move that was deemed alternately visionary and silly, Al Gore called for the launch of Triana-an educational remote sensing satellite that would monitor the earth in real time. In May 1998, communication satellite Galaxy IV malfunctioned and the news media were filled with reports of information systems gone haywire. During "the worst outage" in satellite history, ATM machines withheld their cash, 45 million pagers refused to beep, CNN's airport television service went dark, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" fell silent.¹ More often, our dependency on these machines in orbit is seamlessly fulfilled, and we barely notice their wide array of uses. Meanwhile, plans for a satellite future continue. Motorola has installed its $3.4 billion 66-satellite system Iridium, which provides mobile personal communication services to consumers anywhere on the planet. Similarly, the $9 billion dollar Teledesic system will use 840 satellites to provide Internet access, network capabilities, and videoconferencing "with equal ease to a Manhattan skyscraper or the most remote African village."² Finally, satellite broadcasting companies such as Star TV, Globovision, Chinese Television Network, and Imparja TV are expanding the streams of television programming they deliver to viewers across the globe. Without a doubt, satellites lie at the heart of plans for communication in the next century.

When the first satellite was launched in 1957 people around the world turned toward the skies to witness Russia's historic Sputnik circle the globe. American satellites Echo I, Telstar and Early Bird followed in the early 1960s. During the late 1970s, live satellite feeds became standard in the television industry. By the mid 1980s, multinational media conglomerates, nation-states and local organizations alike began using satellites to relay television services throughout the world. Now at the end of the 20th century, there are an estimated 8,000 functioning machines in orbit.³ Satellites are at the core of our media infrastructure, and they are a principal means by which we come to know and understand a burgeoning global culture.

In this short piece, I want to introduce a critical practice I have called orbital viewing, which involves an imagined spectatorial position that can glance with one eye on the planet and the other toward deep space. When it appears in popular media, this perspective is often figured as the eerie omniscience of an alien intelligence or a heavenly creature, but orbital viewing does not emanate from the eye of God or Big Brother. Instead, it involves a critical appropriation and politicization of an orbiting vantage point that has historically been controlled by Western military, scientific, and corporate institutions. Informed by Donna Haraway's cyborg politics and situated knowledges, orbital viewing blends the "cultural" politics of difference, spectatorial pleasure, and embodiment together with the "scientific" technologies of astronomy, remote sensing, and broadcasting. Orbital viewing uses the satellite platform as a point from which to splinter the monolithic gaze of Western technoscience. For as much as satellite technologies have enabled us to see beyond the earth, they have also positioned the planet as an object-to-be-looked-at. The orbital view is more than a panoptic gaze, however, for while it is remote, it is simultaneously embodied and self-conscious, willing to admit its own partiality. What I want to imagine here is the possibility of a decentralized view from outer space. Historically, the satellite has been controlled by the centralized authority of the state, the scientific academy, or the multinational corporation. As an alternative, an orbital view insists that we acknowledge the situated nature of all satellite knowledges, and it encourages a broader range of ways of looking via satellite.

In this way, orbital viewing differs from Walter Benjamin's "angel of history" and Jody Berland's "post-panoptic observer." For Benjamin's "angel of history" is outside of human culture, looking back at the earth's accumulation of history -- expressed as over-consumption -- and sees capitalist society collapsing in upon itself. The angel of history watches earth consume itself to death, but cannot intervene. Similarly, Jody Berland's "post-panoptic observer" is fully exterior to human earthly practices. This vantage point tells us, she writes, "this is one planet, one life, one world, one dream. This is the view of the globe from the eye of God. . . . This is our planet, its orbs humming with light and shadow in praise of the benevolent, distant eyes of the celestial panopticon."⁴ Both Berland and Benjamin seek to politicize this distant point of view. But while both the angel of history and the post-panoptic observer offer imaginative metaphors for critiquing earthly practices from the vantage point of outer space, neither imagines this perspective as being occupied by anyone other than a singular and omniscient force, however politically leftist, sympathetic or progressive. For the angel of history is a disembodied vanguard intellectual, and the post-panoptic observer is imagined as a divine authority. Orbital viewing instead holds out the possibility that different social formations and interests, once aware of the widespread use and power implications of satellite technologies, might be more politically invested in their use.

Orbital viewing involves a self-reflexive interchange between scientific and cultural practices. In mediating relations between earth and beyond, satellite technologies always call attention back to earth. That is, they articulate scientific practices that can only be understood in relation to human cultures and experiences. This process of satellite mediation reveals the limits of epistemology itself by showing us what translates and what does not; what is visible and what remains invisible; what it's possible to believe in and what is unbelievable. Rather than insist upon the satellite's objectivity, orbital viewing claims that satellite technology tells us as much about our own limits and partialities as it tells us the "truth" of the material world on the earth and beyond.

Orbital viewing involves the transformation and redirection of a perspective that is already prevalent within popular media culture. Not limited to the opening sequences of The Arrival and Contact, orbital viewing is coded in the cosmic zoom of Cosmic Voyage as the perspective peering back as the Earth shrinks into a tiny dot. It is also manifest in the satellite witnessing of mass graves in Bosnia and the satellite excavation of ancient Alexandria. It is hinted at in popular interpretations of Hubble images as a God-like presence. Consider, for instance, the April 1997 cover of National Geographic, which features a captivating Hubble image of the Hourglass Nebula with the caption "Hubble's Eye on the Universe." The nebula looks like a giant cyclops with cloudy, tangerine rings encircling a wide aquamarine eye. The article inside explains that when "astronomers looked 8,000 light years into the cosmos with the Hubble Space Telescope [and found the Hourglass nebula] . . . it seemed that the eye of God was staring back."⁵ Similarly, when television viewers watched CNN's broadcast of Hubble images of the Eagle and Orion Nebulae, they swore they saw Jesus Christ looking back at them. Finally, in 1994 The Weekly World News reported that an "official NASA photograph" revealed the face of Satan in a massive cloud formation on the earth's surface.⁶ Such popular discourses imagine the eye of God looking back at earth, making his presence manifest and frowning upon earthly decadence.⁷ Though sometimes religious in nature, these popular representations are significant because they speak to the possibility of imagining new ways of relating to satellite technologies. Orbital viewing, however, doesn't seek to create a new omniscience or a moralizing gaze from nowhere; instead it seeks to bring the satellite's vantage point into cultural practice, using it as a platform from which different ways of seeing and knowing might proliferate.

As Thierry Jutel suggests, "I can't help thinking that going into outer space is also searching for a reverse shot, for a position from where all systems of representation would be brought to a closure so that the demand/need/desire for the duality of the image -- point of view/object -- could be replaced by the paradoxical emergence of the cosmos as image without a point of view."⁸ As Jody Berland similarly claims, "We are looking at a new type of landscape literacy, in which the 'modern' perspective of the human eye is rendered obsolete -- arguably turning Galileo's telescope, the first direct optical challenge to the combined rule of divine authority and common sense, backwards to view the earth, and so creating a radically new type of divine knowledge."⁹ Orbital viewing attempts to embrace this paradox -- to imagine a dispersed spectatorial position in outer space. There is indeed a popular desire for such a critical gaze, although for the most part it has been inflected by religious discourses and Western tales of evolutionary cosmology. Instead, orbital viewing invites the people's eyes onto the satellite pedestal. Rather than imagining the eye of God in orbit, we ought to place our own scrutinizing eyes there.

We need to begin to witness from orbital positions. We need to make satellites accountable for what they see and make visible, and we need to increase public awareness to these technologies. One organization, Public Eye, has already initiated such a practice; formed by the Federation of American Scientists, Public Eye calls for the use of remote sensing satellites in the public interest.¹⁰ Several human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch and Refugees International have also called for the use of satellites in the public interest, specifically to assist in disaster and refugee relief efforts.¹¹ Even Gore's Triana proposal places the public gaze in orbit. Although members of Congress have ridiculed Triana, Gore's plan has so far been the only initiative for a "public access" remote sensing satellite. Perhaps Triana seems so ridiculous because for too long such technologies have remained within the tight grasp of military, corporate and scientific agencies. Indeed, we can scarcely imagine a remote sensing satellite that is immediately accountable to those who lie in its field of vision. As early as 1984, however, video activist Nam Jun Paik envisioned the satellite as a public access medium when he and a handful of other artists (including Laurie Anderson, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky) produced a live transatlantic satellite exchange entitled 1984/Good Morning Mr. Orwell. This early production imagined the satellite as a medium of transnational counterculture, political commentary and artistic expression. Orbital viewing reinforces such struggles to control satellite technologies, and it anticipates that different peoples would likely use satellites to see and know in different ways.¹² "Public access" is not in itself liberatory or progressive, but opening satellite technologies to a wider array of uses might make them more accessible to diverse meanings and regimes of knowledge. Orbital viewing recognizes that satellite technologies profoundly shape power relations on earth and it seeks to disrupt the totalizing truth claims so often formed via satellite.

Orbital viewing offers several critical interventions, then. First, it involves the politicization of orbital platforms -- that is, the recognition that the earth's perimeter is now a conduit for thousands of orbiting information machines that produce knowledges that are immediately relevant to social and political struggles on the earth. Second, orbital viewing assumes that it is possible to develop a critical and self-reflexive scrutiny of practices on earth that occur on global, national and local scales. It's not necessary -- or even desirable -- to achieve an objective, neutral distance from those activities in order to see and analyze them adequately. Rather, orbital viewing attempts to occupy satellite vantage points in order to make visible the operations and effects of a constellation of invisible knowledge machines. Third, orbital viewing is not about eliminating satellite technologies. Instead, it's about struggling over how they have been and should be used. It's about questioning who controls, regulates and accesses orbiting machines that are integrally involved in the organization of time, vision, history and culture.

In sum, the uses of this technology of knowledge, this tactile connection, this transnational mediator must be subject to critical intervention and public debate. Orbital viewing seizes upon several satellite mediascapes in an effort to initiate critical discussions about the satellite's cultural power. We might end, then, on the moment when the satellite first entered our culture. On October 4, 1957, when Sputnik first crossed our skies, we imagined it shooting through the cold void of space, tethered to the earth by the pull of gravity. Even that first satellite proclaimed its human connection with a repetitive pinging sound that was heard the world over.¹³ Like Sputnik, today's satellites are tethered to earth as much by everyday cultures as by gravitational physics. For as they connect, divide, and transform our lives, they are, perhaps paradoxically, among the most cultural of technologies.

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Notes

1. Mike Mills, "Satellite Glitch Cuts Off Data Flow," Washington Post, May 21, 1998, p. A1. [back]

2. Eric Shine, "Biz Blasts Off," Business Week, Jan. 27, 1997, p. 63. [back]

3. Hal Stucker, "Junkosphere," Wired, Feb. 1998, p. 40. [back]

4. Berland, "Mapping Space: Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body," in Technoscience and Cyberculture, Stanley Aronowitz et al., eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 129. [back]

5. William R. Newcott, "Time Exposures," National Geographic, April 1997, p. 3. [back]

6. "Satellite Takes Photo of Satan's Face -- On Planet Earth!," Weekly World News, June 25, 1996. [back]

7. Jeff Sconce has shown that communication technologies have long been associated with spiritual presence. See Television Ghosts: A Cultural History of Electronic Presence in Telecommunications Technology, doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1995. [back]

8. Quoted in Sarah Williams, "'Perhaps Images at One With the World Are Already Lost Forever': Visions of Anthropology in Post-Cultural Worlds," in The Cyborg Handbook, Chris Hables Gray, ed., (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 381. [back]

9. Jody Berland, "Mapping Space: Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body," in Technoscience and Cyberculture, Stanley Aronowitz et al., eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 127. [back]

10. Public Eye Project, Federation of American Scientists. Available at: http://www.fas.org/eye/project.htm. Accessed Aug. 7, 1998. [back]

11. "Public Eye: Spy Satellite Technology May Assist Government Watchdogs." Scientific American, Aug. 1996. Available at: http://www.sciamcom/0896issue/0896scicit01.html. Accessed June 19, 1998. [back]

12. Nancy Fraser argues that rather than think of the public sphere as a unified whole, we might better analyze it as a site of ongoing cultural struggles between dominant and subaltern counter-publics. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Social Text, 8-9:3-1, 25-26 (1990), pp. 56-80. [back]

13. For a discussion of cultural responses to Sputnik, see Lisa Parks, "Technology in the Twilight: A Cultural History of the First Earth Satellite," Humanites and Technology Review, 16 (Fall 1997), pp. 3-20. [back]