Rethinking the Landscape Image in an Age of Planetarity

02.06.2026 02.06., 14:00–16:00, C40.530, Climate Futures Workshop

For this workshop, I welcome discussion on a working draft of a section of the introduction of an ongoing book project titled, Machinic Landscapes: Technology, Art and Environment in an Age of Planetarity. The book concerns how the visual output of environmental digital imaging systems such as the vast sensing networks of satellite imaging, statistical modeling programs of spatial design, topographical mapping and predictive environmental simulations are enveloped in operations of actionable knowledge production within scientific and military contexts. I argue that these technologies also produce new ways of seeing landscape. This book is a study of contemporary artistic engagement with both the infrastructures and visual output of these technologies and the ways in which they introduce new ways of seeing landscape and being with environment. Contemporary artistic engagement with these technologies produces counter imaginaries to the original contexts of their development providing for speculative, critical and utopic potentials of the landscape genre. Both contemporary and historical forms of representing landscape through technology are considered against the backdrop of major epistemic shifts such as the naming of a new geologic age of the Anthropocene, planetary-scale computation, and wide-scale resource extractivism. This inquiry is based on an understanding that the ways that we see and know our physical environments are increasingly negotiated through a technical and automated engagement and that the aesthetics of these technical systems are a central aspect to consider in their ability to produce meaning.  

This book project has been generously supported by a grant awarded by the Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant, book category, in 2023. For this workshop, the section of the introduction that will be discussed will most likely be about my ongoing interest in drawing on interdisciplinary discourses of landscape theory within art theory, architecture, cultural geography and anthropology and how it may contribute to a wider discussion on the role of technology and planetary computation and its aesthetics in an age of the Anthropocene. For the past year, my curiosity has shifted the direction of the book somewhat slightly from its original focus on earthly environments towards studying landscapes as they have been and are perceived in outer space, including those of Martian landscapes through the Mars rover as well as colonial histories of solar observation. I have written about and referenced the work of artists, Rohini Devasher and Minna Långström so far in this regard. I am concerned with bringing these interests of earthly and cosmic landscapes together and how they may aesthetically reflect upon, contrast and illuminate each other.  I welcome feedback and thinking with this draft and ways in which it could develop and or need clarity. I will also provide another text to be read which is a chapter titled, “Aesthetics” written by cultural theorists, Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller from their book, The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities (2020) to provide discursive context, which may add to the discussion. 

Lila Lee-Morrison (she/they) is a writer, scholar and art historian. Her research interests include investigating the visuality of contemporary technologies of machinic and algorithmic perception and the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of its application and material infrastructures. She is author of the book, Portraits of Automated Facial Recognition: On Machinic Ways of Seeing the Face (Transcript Verlag, 2019) and has published with MIT Press, Artforum, Liverpool University Press, and Distanz Verlag. She graduated a Ph.D. in Art History from Lund University and is based in Malmö, Sweden. She is currently an Associate Professor, Adjunct at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York.