AI in the Sky: Orbital Infrastructuring, Planetary Perception, and Digital Twins of Earth

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Bettina Papenburg
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563507000

The overarching goal of the project is to develop a new theoretical and methodological approach in the field of media studies by conducting exemplary media ethnographic laboratory research at the German Aerospace Center and other selected locations of the Copernicus Earth Observation Program in combination with a dispositive and usage analysis of geo-medial platforms such as Destination Earth (DestinE), which collect data for the development of simulation models, so-called digital twins, of the earth. Specifically, this means exploring how and for what purpose machine learning is used in satellite control and in the evaluation of geodata to answer the question of how such media techniques generate insights into planetary climate development. The thesis is that the knowledge generated by sensor technology and machine learning in remote sensing pretends not just the hypervisibility and calculability of planetary phenomena but, moreover, organizes around a black box. The predominantly automated infrastructures of data collection and data analysis exclude human perceptual and cognitive performance in favor of a fantasy of predictability and prognostics and relegate human interpretative activity to the beginning – the conception phase – and the end – the interpretation phase – of the knowledge process. The first sub-goal of the project is to explore the infrastructures and media techniques of planetary perception to determine the relationship between the sensible and the intelligible by evaluating the interactions between the aesthetics and epistemology of satellite images and learning algorithms. Based on the insight that sensing and sense-making drift apart here, the project will explore a middle way between a media epistemology that understands artificial intelligence (AI) as ideology and a media epistemology that focuses on AI as a classification tool. The second sub-goal is to work out which worldviews are reinforced or undermined by the digital twins of the earth, which simulate different, thematically-oriented future scenarios. The aim is to determine what becomes perceptible and what becomes imperceptible through the suggestion of a planetary oversight and what consequences this has for the self-world relationship. The thesis is that the aesthetics of the hyper-visible, which simulation models of the earth imply, anesthetizes the sense of the invisible. The third sub-goal is to demonstrate the added value that a praxeological-microanalytical approach brings to theory formation in media studies. To this end, the empirically gained insights into the sensory-aesthetic practices of remote sensing are to be linked to the epistemological reflection of the worldviews manifested in the simulation models.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Norway
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Aurora Hoel