New York, September 11, 2001 - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 73

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, FOUR DAYS LATER
New York, 2001— Saturday, September 15, 2001, 11:54 a.m. Between a satellite and
thousands of bodies, a cloud of smoke drifts.
Space Imaging's Ikonos satellite takes a high-resolution snapshot from outer
space of a city in a state of emergency. The satellite monitors the Earth's surface,
collecting data. That Saturday morning, the cloud of smoke slowly drifts away
from the disaster.
There is a lot to see in this picture, too much in fact. The density of its detail
demands that it be viewed close-up. But there is no single thing to look for and no
particular piece of evidence that tells the whole story. And so the entire image is on
view here, blown up, too large to see all at once. But the zoom offers no revelation,
no instant of enlightenment, and no sublime incomprehension, either. It tells many
stories. What has happened? The satellite's sensors capture a mass grave, a record
of a crime or an act of war. Unfortunately or fortunately, the image itself offers no
instructions about how to understand or respond to what it has recorded in memory.
For the record, this image should not exist, and neither should the events it has
captured. It is an unacceptable image, but it is imperative that we look at it.
Here are two 1-meter-resolution satellite images of the aftermath of the event:
detailed pictures of a disaster. The first image was collected at 11:43 a.m. on Sep -
tember 12, 2001, a bit more than twenty-four hours after the attack, released by
Space Imaging and published worldwide almost immediately. 44 The second, from
September 15, was purchased at a cost of several thousand dollars and arrived in
the form of a 323-megabyte data file from Space Imaging. It forms the basis of the
images in this chapter.
High-resolution satellite images are one of our most powerful metaphors for
the new condition of universality: an all-seeing image, potentially of any point on
Earth, available to almost anyone, rich in data that can be used for purposes we
cannot even predict. It offers precision, time-stamped evidence from an authorita-
tive eyewitness. But it wants to represent the magnitude of the event: with the
sublimity appropriate to a catastrophe, it offers the view from above, from “over -
head,” in which the city is seen in the midst of an emergency. It tries to see every -
thing at once, everything that cannot usually be seen with the human eye. If it
fails, it should tell us—in just the manner proper to the sublime—about the limits
of our understanding. In the end, though, the image is neither the definitive eye -
witness nor the record of our incomprehension.
The buildings are missing, disintegrated into a vast zone of ruin. The city
is quiet, except for intensive activity around the site. There are trucks along