Planetary Voyeurism

Research project
LA+ GEO
2020

We coin the term “planetary voyeurism” to describe the (unintended) consequences of abstract visualizations of environmental impacts. Over the past decade, innovative digital technologies such as satellites, drones, and distributed environmental sensing networks, combined with ever-cheaper cloud-based computing, have enabled geographers and designers to “see” environmental changes on a planetary scale. An unprecedented amount of geodata is now available at rapidly decreasing cost. But when we visualize Earth, which perspectives do we privilege, and what perceptions and actions do these visualizations enable?

In this paper, we caution that technologically mediated ways of seeing and perceiving global environmental change, while certainly valuable and informative, often arise from and/or produce an (unintended) voyeurism. We offer the concept of planetary voyeurism in order to spark a dialogue about how visual practices of abstraction and aestheticization might obscure the intimate and variegated dimensions of the Anthropocene.