Our Focus Areas
Extractions
Power/energy infrastructure
The transition from oil and gas to cleaner forms of energy represents a cultural, technological, and environmental transition requiring an unprecedented level of coordination and foresight. While the green energy transition is underway, conventional energy infrastructure is still plentiful across North America. Oil and gas extraction, transportation, and refinement; coal, forestry, and nuclear – the ongoing activities and lasting impacts of these mature industries are still readily visible. At the same time, we now see the rapid proliferation of newer, renewable energy infrastructure in the form of wind, solar, geothermal, wave, and tidal. The large-scale nature of most energy infrastructure, and its great geographic distribution, makes the aerial perspective an especially apt means to tell the story of the energy transition during this unique juncture in human history.
Cultivations/farming & agriculture
Industrial agriculture ties together questions of water use, ecological change, public health, and economy in a way that affects us all intimately, but is difficult to conceptualize. With the proliferation and consolidation of industrial agriculture over the second half of the 20th century, the percentage of Americans who are farmers decreased drastically. Farming and living, for most people, became separated physically and conceptually. By making industrial agriculture visible and experiential to a broader audience, we connect communities that produce food with communities that consume it, all through the complexities of this land practice and its implications.
Water/dams, desalination & droughts
The need for, and availability of, water shapes conditions of livability at local, regional, and global scales. Water scarcity in desert and semi-desert landscapes catalyzed engineering projects at unprecedented scales in the 20th century, and we are still living with both the infrastructure and the blind optimism encapsulated in these projects that water can be resolutely controlled. Even in non-desert environments, water is becoming more scarce, more unpredictable, or more polluted. Perspectives from above help to conceptualize the way water is transported, treated, and depleted.
Virtualities/material aspects of digital and information infrastructure
While our lives online are often shrouded by ambiguous metaphors like ‘the cloud’, expanding digital technologies leave growing material footprints. Data centers, submarine cables, and internet exchange points are just some instances of the physical architectures that inevitably support the increasing wirelessness of the 21st century. While many of these components of virtual life are obscured underground or within buildings, we can glimpse many from the air. By understanding how digital infrastructures interact with the surrounding human and nonhuman landscape, we see how the connectivity of the internet age relies on the physical connectedness of telecommunications and energy infrastructure across great distances.
Fragilities/weather events, climate change & the contemporary space race
Our dwelling on the earth is a continual negotiation with the unpredictable forces that surround us, a condition that becomes only more urgent as the effects of climate change increase the likelihood of devastating natural disasters. The cumulative effects of environmental and elemental imbalances have spurred a broad recognition of the fragility of human life on earth on a planetary scale, causing some to consider leaving earth altogether. We tie these themes together to underscore the vulnerability of life on earth, and pursue aerial photography as a way to relate to these events that places them in both a global context and in the context of our own communities and lives.
The Altitude Project