New York, September 11, 2001 - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 71

5 New York, September 11, 2001

In a sense, I went from one mass grave to another,
but not intentionally

New York, 2012— I had been commissioned to produce an image for an exhibition
on surveillance called CTRL [ SPACE ] at the ZKM, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medi -
entechnologie, in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2001. Ikonos had been launched the year
before, and I had planned to order a 1-meter-resolution image of the Cameroonian
rain forest. I looked almost every day for much of the year, but as the deadline
approached, there were no cloudless days over that part of Cameroon, making it
impossible to fill the order.
Then, the World Trade Center was attacked. A 1-meter-resolution Ikonos image
of the site appeared in newspapers shortly thereafter, and I knew then what I
would display at ZKM. I wanted to show Ground Zero a few days later, in its urban
context—the empty streets that so many people came to remember from that time
period—so that, like SPOT 083-264 , the image could serve as a marker of an event.
The ZKM show opened in October 2001. The image was blown up and displayed
on the floor of the gallery for people to examine, seventeen meters long and six
meters wide. No one wanted to walk on Ground Zero. It was very raw.
The satellite image, available almost immediately, seemed to signify the realiza-
tion of the promise of immediate public access to global satellite images, which is
to say, the notion of “global transparency,” that had been repeated with each new
launch, but something different in fact happened. Access was denied.
The United States went to war very quickly in Afghanistan, and as CNN's new
anchorman Aaron Brown put it on October 8, 2001: “It is not obviously a televi -
sion war.” 41 It was also not a transparent war. What was significant was the lack of
imagery then—and the resolve of the Pentagon to enforce the lack. The Depart -
ment of Defense purchased the exclusive rights to all Ikonos imagery over Afghan-
istan and its surroundings at the beginning of the war—for a month—and then
renewed that contract for a second month. Even after that, though, things did not